Quadrant Online » Opinionhttps://quadrant.org.au
The leading general intellectual journal of ideas, literature, poetry and historical and political debate published in Australia.Thu, 24 May 2018 18:56:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.6.2-alphaOther People’s Money at ANUhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/peoples-money-anu/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/peoples-money-anu/#commentsThu, 24 May 2018 02:09:07 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84877As might have been expected, Paul Ramsay's generous bequest to establish the Centre for Western Civilisation is under attack. It seems universities need money and lots of it, but coffers overseen by cultural conservatives are beyond the pale. Why, they might be "racists"!

]]>In North America hikers are warned never to get between a bear and her cubs. In Australia, where humans are the closest we get to mega-carnivores, that advice also applies, albeit in antipodean translation: Don’t get between leftist academics and a pile of other people’s money.

At James Cook University, Professor Peter Ridd has just been fired after asserting much of his colleagues’ research can’t withstand scrutiny, the subtext being that a body of academic opinion has been corrupted and shaped by the building of empires and the pursuit of funding. There are no grants likely for those who say there are no problems, and thus do many problems come to light.

At ANU, where the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation is finding its feet, much the same money lust has crystallised in a letter from an academics union shop steward who doesn’t like the idea such cash isn’t going to the usual suspects. From today’sAustralian:

Mr [Matthew] King singled out a Quadrant article written by Ramsay Centre director and former prime minister Tony Abbott in which he “implies that the Ramsay Centre would wield considerable influence over staffing and curriculum decisions”.

“If this is true, we are very concerned that this would violate the core principles of academic freedom, integrity and independence, and reflects an ignorance of, or disregard for, the role of the academic board as final arbiter of academic standards,” Mr King wrote.

“If the Ramsay Centre agreement is perceived to compromise on these principles, it will be ­rejected by staff, students and other stakeholders and could lead to significant anger, protest and ­division.”

Abbott’s essay on the Ramsay Centre appeared in our April edition and can be read in full here. Here is what the former prime minister actually says about hiring and recruitment:

“A management committee including the Ramsay CEO and also its academic director will make staffing and curriculum decisions.”

Well, yes, that would qualify as “considerable influence”, but it is the Ramsay Centre’s own money when all is said and done.

Abbott is, of course, talking about the board of an academic institution funded by the bequest of a man, Paul Ramsay, who spelled out in his will exactly what he expected his generosity to achieve. As Abbott noted in Quadrant,

[Ramsay was] “acutely conscious of ‘O’Sullivan’s law’, first formulated by the former editor (now international editor) of Quadrant, John O’Sullivan, namely that “every organisation that’s not explicitly right-wing, over time becomes left-wing”. This is a serious risk for the Ramsay Centre but I’m confident that this fate will be avoided.”

By the reckoning of the ANEU’s Matthew King, those hiring decisions should be made by ANU’s “academic board as final arbiter of academic standards”. He is supported by the student union’s Eleanor Kay, who comments in the ANU Observer how Western civilisation is often used as “a rhetorical tool to continue the racist prioritisation of Western history over other cultures”.

And just who sits on the academic board? Quite a few professors, many of whom might not regard the study and defence of Western civilisation as a prime and pressing goal:

Blaxland effusively praises the Labor Attorney-General Lionel Bowen. In 1984, Bowen rejected a proposed “non-political” expulsion of a GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) Science and Technology officer who exported to the USSR and Eastern Europe against Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) rules. Bowen threw the papers across the desk to Barnett and said, “So what?” He decreed Australian law was not broken and left for the races.

Want an academic whose pedigree begins with an internship at the Australian Human Rights Commission? Meet Ms Alyssa Shaw, who lists her fields of inquiry as “focusing on feminist theory and gender.”

Alas, there is “limited funding for research seeking to develop appropriate technologies and policy options for successful implementation.” A few more grants, however, and writing about ways to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere might well constitute a promising career option. As the Climate Change Institute puts it, ” Given this research need, and the present gap in research on the topic, there is likely to be significant future interest in this space.”

Money matters in academia and if the Ramsay Centre’s board — Kim Beazley, Joe de Bruyn, John Howard, Howard Leeser and Abbott — don’t know as much, it looks like they will soon learn.

The full membership of ANU’s academic board can be found here. Readers with an idle few minutes might care to click on biographical links — the above were selected largely at random — and learn more of those being advanced as better qualified than a late donor’s stewards to decide where and how the Ramsay money is spent.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/peoples-money-anu/feed/4Apples, Oranges and Immigrationhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/apples-oranges-immigration/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/apples-oranges-immigration/#commentsTue, 22 May 2018 05:49:52 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84822Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech raised the alarm about what was, 50 years ago, but a problem in gestation. Today, co-driven by globablism and multiculturalism's purported role as the salve for the West's real and imagined ancient sins, the need for a rational approach to immigration is pressing

Enoch Powell had a long and highly distinguished career. It included a professorial appointment in classics at the age of twenty-five at Sydney University – an ironic historic footnote, given that institution’s almost total conversion to oily political correctness – plus many more accomplishments in the military and in politics. Yet, despite his manifest achievements, he is pretty much remembered for one thing only, that speech.

Powell has been variously considered principled, racist, foolhardy, prescient, and a lot more besides for his call to limit immigration his call inspired at the time by what he saw as mounting evidence of rising conflict resulting directly from the importing of other cultures to the UK. Little did Powell realise what would transpire in the early twenty-first century, an era described by Douglas Murray as an age of suicide by European governments seemingly hell bent on inviting immolation at the bloody altar of multiculturalism. What was a mere trickle from Commonwealth countries in the 1960s, leading to real but probably exaggerated racial disquiet, has become a deluge, a veritable invasion, especially of Muslims. They come armed with the mores of their troubled homelands and a culture endorsed in its presumed superiority by holy texts that, just for good measure, treat women and their human rights with a propertarian disregard for the conventions of the society they have entered and changed but never joined.

Back in Australia, in locations such as the increasingly lawless outer Melbourne, we see violence by out-of-control imported African gangs and the insipid responses of major parties and the politically correct Victoria Police, whose brass insist in one breath there is no gang problem and in the next admit there is. Then tghey deny it again. These same police, by the way, have been seemingly more devoted to investigating a senior Catholic cleric before any actual complaints were been lodged, then finding drug addicts, bash artists and main-chancers to validate them. That at least makes a change from shaking down motorists by serving as revenue agents and charging visiting speakers five-figure sums to protect them from rampaging leftist mobs.

This is the same Australia that tut-tutted at John Howard in 1988 when he suggested, very gently, from the Opposition benches, that a slow-down in the rate of then-rising (and now galloping) Asian immigration would be a good idea. Like Powell, and very recently Tony Abbott, Howard was merely listening to what his constituents were saying. And like the other two, Howard did not believe those constituents to be racist.

Each age has its “difficult” immigrants, it seems. What is different now is that, since the exponential rise in global people movements from around 1990 that was fuelled by globalisation policies seeking to impose a truly borderless world, we have now almost unrecognisable, discombobulated places whose lonng-term inhabitants’ heads are spinning. We have tribal enclaves where interactions with native inhabitants are minimal and non-collaborative. Try getting a beer these days in Lakemba now that the last pub has closed its doors. Understandably, we see an exodus of former residents who don’t know what has happened to their communities or why. We have increasing violence, emergent gang culture, lawlessness and an arrogance on the part of the newcomers, which is understandable. When the official doctrine of the state holds that all cultures are equal and, sillier even than that, how the ills of the world are a legacy of racist white colonialism, why make an effort to assimilate? Indeed, stick your daughter in a burka and do so with pride. Western feminists won’t utter a peep of protest and, if there is criticism, dash off a complaint to the Human Rights Commission.

So what is the response to all this, and what should tolerant, liberal people who live in a country built on immigration regard as an appropriate annual number and trajectory? In one sense, there is simply too much in play in the current debates over the appropriate level of immigration, with things getting badly mixed up as a result. Here think of jumbled conversations and mistaken analyses of cause and effect. Finally, there is the question of whether limiting the rate of increase of immigration now would have an impact on the problems we already have, problems that are possibly the result, at least in part, of our previous high immigration policies.

Some preliminary points are needed.

One, there is not much in principle wrong with the notion of a “big Australia”. Many of the objections completely miss the point, especially those of Bob Carr and Paul Ehrlich-types who think all populations should be cut.

Two, there is no “magic” number of immigrants. All numbers are relative to some other variable, such as available work, skills shortages and needs, general prevailing economic conditions, current birth and death rates, and so on. The current “right” number of immigrants is only right in relation to these other things.

Three, the impact of immigration on our economy is positive, but only marginally so. The problems are non-economic. Yes, there is still “they took our jobs” thinking among existing residents. But in a world of increasingly rapid changing skills and skills-matching-needs (due to globalisation, technology, outsourcing, offshoring, hyper-mobility, ease of moving, disruption and so on), this argument has lost a lot of force.

Four, neither is there a magic number for an Australian population of the “right” size. We are the world’s fourteenth-biggest economy and could easily do with more growth. Yes, we are limited by governments that either can’t or won’t build the infrastructure we need in the places we need it, and who prefer vanity projects of little economic or social consequence. There is indeed a correlation between the adequacy of infrastructure, the perception of the adequacy of infrastructure by residents, and fear of further pressure on infrastructure by future population increases. And yes, it is important that we maintain support for our immigration policies.

But, and it is a big but. Cutting immigration numbers in the future will not solve existing infrastructure problems. At whatever level of immigration we have, we will be required to build adequate housing and transport systems. Much better to fix the systemic problems we have now – vertical fiscal imbalance, debauched federalism, out-of-control spending on things like transfer payments, the ABC, subsidised child care, useless education pipedreams, unaffordable NDISs, trams in George Street, regional vanity projects (and so on), that stop governments focusing on better infrastructure, one of their core tasks.

Five, law and order problems are law and order problems, not size-of-immigration-intake problems. Kick out the troublemakers? Too easy. Limiting in-migration now is too late, and will not solve the problems. Get genuine police forces, not touchy feely community strokers. Limiting future immigration intakes, absent fixing the other problems we have right here right now, simply will not help.

Six, if we bleat endlessly about multiculturalism, we should insist that new arrivals should try it sometime! It goes both ways, folks.

Seven, who comes is way more important than how many, the migrant mix being important beyond other things, such as the size of the intake. Bring in people who can speak the language or are eager to learn it, are ready to work or invest, who don’t come from troubled places where local mayhem has driven their decision to leave. Immigrants used to be regarded as the ultimate entrepreneurs. Now many seem to be the ultimate welfare scroungers at best and troublemakers at worst. Spend 30 minutes in your local Centrelink and observe the ethnic mix of what, in this era of euphemism, are known as “clients” rather than mendicants. On this view, we could keep the current rate but radically change the mix.

So, solutions.

We should not mix up immigration issues with other matters that look like they are related but are not. We should do law and order properly. We should ditch multiculti fantasies and rediscover the real assimilation that was expected during the great post-war migration boom. We should ditch all welfare for immigrants. We should build proper infrastructure for a growing population. We should not ditch our long-term goal of growing bigger, but we should just do it smarter, for example by subsidising natural increase. The much-sniggered-at baby bonus was a cracker policy that actually worked. We should ensure visa scams are upended (we all know what they are and who is involved). We should attempt more seriously to stop foreign nationals buying up the country, its real estate and its infrastructure. We should all speak English routinely in the public square.

We do need to make Australia great again. We need to make it Australia again, actually., and we can do that while continuing to grow.

By all means let us have our immigration numbers debate. But do it with Howard and Enoch Powell in mind, and the actual problems they saw and commented on. And let us do it with our eyes open by aligning the many problems we have as a nation with the best policy and cultural solutions available for these problems. We should not burden immigration policy with the task of solving things for which it is not equipped.

What the Rivers of Blood speech did some half a century ago was to alert us to immigration follies and to what should be the proper limits of an out-of-control concept Powell did not at that time know about: globalism. Powell’s speech still deserves our attention, indeed commands it. But let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Population growth is good, indeed essential, and immigration will play its proper part in that and we need to get it right. But it is about way more than mere numbers.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/apples-oranges-immigration/feed/8Tom Wolfe, a Man in Fullhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/man-full-tom-wolfe/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/man-full-tom-wolfe/#commentsMon, 21 May 2018 03:45:03 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84791During our lifetime virtually all satire has been directed against the old conservative establishment, even after it had lost its monopoly position. Wolfe recognised our new masters and, with keen eye and sharper pen, illuminated this risen class of the inherently ludicrous and self-parodic

]]>The US author Tom Wolfe, who died in May aged 88, invented a new way of composing novels, a new take on cultural commentary, and a new style of dress and living, all of which dovetailed. It has been fashionable in high-octane US literary and theory circles to deride his four large (in every way) novels as schmaltzy blockbusters, like James Cozzens’ By Love Possessed, because they have a conventional structure of plot, characters and narrative drive. But his novels broke new ground, as the hero and focus in these works is not a character, nor a story line, but a distinctive urban milieu which he foregrounds, a city such as New York, Chicago, Atlanta or Miami, in all its complex articulations, ethnicities, snobberies and social strivings.

Wolfe believed, correctly, that in the arts modernity had been pushed too far. In painting artists elevated annotations and explanations of their paintings to the same status, or even higher, as the works themselves, as he demonstrated in The Painted Word. Since then Tracey Emin’s dishevelled bed and Damian Hurst’s formaldehyde shark have taken meretricious indulgence to a new level. Many orchestras dislike performing Philip Glass’ scores because of their affinity with synthesizer muzac. Self-obsessed novelists now parade a facsimile of themselves as the hero of their ‘fictions’, inviting the reader to join the mutual admiration society. The great thing about a Wolfe novel is that he is absent; he stands aside, using his detachment to accurately pinpoint changing social mores without himself moralizing about them. His characters do the character assassination for themselves.

A lot of US novelists from Mailer to Roth so embraced every new frenzy that we understand them now not as acute analysts of American society, as they saw themselves, but as dupes of its constant twists. After reading a Wolfe novel we feel, not depressed as with so many contemporary novels, but a sense of relief, that someone has nailed current madnesses so accurately and risen so cleanly above the dross. Wolfe does this with insight, wit and style. When I visit the US, I enjoy the experience not as a tourist vising sites, but as street theatre, where citizens put on a show for us by naturally externalizing and theatricalizing the events of their daily life. No other society I know does this. Wolfe captures in his novels life as public entertainment.

In the Bonfire of the Vanities, Sherman McCoy, the person at the centre of a scandal, is targeted by adversary groups and humiliated because he comes from an ostracized group, the money makers. As he undergoes his purgatorio he sloughs off his former ‘Master of the Universe’ persona; Gleb Nerzhin, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle,has a similar trajectory. Both characters start out as part of a dominant group, having power but without peace of mind. As they lose their place and are imprisoned, they develop a more robust personality and belief structure. They have lost power but gained inner freedom, in contrast to the sectors of society which condemns them.

Wolfe was ground-breaking in directly his satire at a new group. He had noticed a change in our power structures. The old establishment did rule the roost in the 1950s, but since the swinging Sixties a new establishment has arisen. After its long march through the universities, media, politics and the public service, this new amalgam of politically acceptable trendies has now reached the commanding heights of society, and wields enormous institutional power. Look how it has recently dawned on the business community, once the heart of the old establishment, that there’s a new power elite in town and they had better defer to it pretty smartly. Most societies naturally lag in self-understanding: during our lifetime virtually all satire has been directed against the old conservative establishment, even after it had lost its monopoly position. Lazy journalists still constantly use clichés like ‘big oil’, ‘the leafy suburbs’ and ‘the big end of town’ as code for their sneering, undeclared, and now out-of-date, prejudices. Haven’t they they gone for a drive on Saturday mornings and noticed it is the trendies, including the journalists themselves, who are now conspicuous in the leafy suburbs? What has become of their social antenna, once a defining mark of their profession?

The old establishment believed behaviour should fundamentally remain the same. The new trendy establishment believes you have to twist yourself into a new shape with every change of the breeze. It keeps itself in power by pretending it is not an establishment, just a few valiant guys and dolls courageously kicking against the pricks. But this leads it down the garden path. The day after Hilary lost the US elections, TV kept showing rows of sooky, well-dressed girls in a university theatre crying their hearts out for their fallen heroine, as though they were the victims of US society, rather than the unemployed rust belt steel workers, mid western farmers, Detroit auto workers, and their families. The media still doesn’t get it. The ABC’s resident comedians still adopt this stance; they don’t direct their satirical scorn at the ruling in-group. Australia has its fair share of posturing moralizers and other self-saucing puddings hogging the media limelight. Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out as long ago as the 1960s that contemporary satire has become difficult, since so many public personalities are now inherently ludicrous and self-parodying. You don’t really need an Alec Baldwin when you have a Donald Trump.

Whenever I think of Tom Wolfe I think of Barry Humphries. The similarities are remarkable. They were almost the same age, they were au fond satirists, and both were natty dressers. The Southerner Wolfe attired himself in smart white suits to distinguish himself from the denizens of New York. Both believed clothing signalled the man. For them the key determinant was not class nor wealth nor status, but style, an ability to carry things off with a certain creative panache in contrast to the philistinism of the faux modern. Neither would have been out of place as a flaneur in fin de siecle Paris, the culture from which their demeanour ultimately derived. Both were literally boulevardiers, people who strolled around the streets of big cities, accurately taking in the sounds and sights and current idiosyncrasies.

Both were neither conservative nor radical; they were bohemian liberals (of the neat not shaggy type), who at some stage were mugged by reality into realizing the new establishment was a danger, to be undermined with gentle scorn. They did not think in outmoded left-versus-right terms. Wolfe popularized ‘radical chic’ to show it was the contradictory convergence of adversarial and fashionable behaviour, the extremes against the sensible centre, that constituted the new disaster. Humphries invented a counter-cultural poseur Craig Steppenwolf and a trade union heavy Lance Boyle, and compiled a monthly column Pseud’s Corner in Quadrant, in which by merely quoting the latest opinions of the bien-pensant he exposed the fatuities of the day.

By coincidence The Times Literary Supplement republished, on April 27, a few weeks before Wolfe’s death, an old review by Christopher Hitchens of The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Hitchens alluded to the smart-arsed British journalist on the make in the novel, Peter Fallow, without mentioning that Hitchens himself was a model for that devastating characterization. Saul Bellow created the equally obnoxious journalist, Dewey Spangler, in his novel The Dean’s December, in which he shows how world-ranging activists posing as journalists (think John Pilger and Michael Moore) drum up, sensationalize and propagandize events they are supposed to be merely reporting. In all this Wolfe had a career parallel to that of Saul Bellow. Wolfe and Bellow didn’t admire each other, perhaps because they occupied the same territory. Both wrote novels of social satire which skewered the new class, and both at the same time produced a stream of non-fiction, high calibre cultural commentary, which provided a documentary background to their creative achievements.

]]>Among the members of our retired guys’ tennis club there is a boffin who used to work at Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL). When it floated at $2.30 in 1994, he used an idle $10,000 to take up the staff offer. He never sold the parcel. You probably know that CSL has been a sensational long-term investment. When this guy returned my serve, I’d think, “Nice slice, James Packer!”

CSL is one of my rare good picks. I bought 160 shares at about $31 donkey’s years ago, a $5000 investment, and I’ve watched my parcel rocket to around $28,000. So whenever CSL’s share price flashes up on the finance segment of the ABC’s 7pm news, I salivate like Pavlov’s dog. On Friday (May 18) it was ABC chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici handling the finance section. She did an excellent intro comparing Australian and NZ budget and economic parameters. Well done, Emma!

Her nine errors in the news piece and general ignorance of the subject saw a cringing ABC beaten up by an outraged Prime Minister, the Treasurer, plus the Communications Minister and business leaders.[2] It turned out that even a prior two-hour briefing from Australian Taxation Office Deputy Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn had failed to enlighten her to the basics of company tax. For example, tax is paid on profit, not on revenue. Concepts such as carry-forward of losses (think Qantas) were way beyond her reach.

A Treasurer’s adviser on February 14 sent the ABC a 1600 word email concluding, “Ms Alberici’s story reveals an inherent bias and is ­activism disguised as journalism, and we would expect more from the ABC’s chief economics correspondent.”

ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie blamed “inadequate editorial resources” — $1.2 billion a year only goes so far, you know – for the publication of the articles. The national broadcaster has since increased editorial oversight, she said.

So last night, after New Zealand, Emma moved on to the boilerplate finance stuff — the day’s exchange rates, global indexes and, finally, local stocks.

“Shares in CSL put in a stellar performance today on the back of a fairly harsh northern hemisphere flu season,” Emma said as I drooled at the thought of my expanding wealth. She didn’t mention the price but my eyes flicked to her graphic alongside. The prices listed at the closing bell for Woodside and Santos were spot-on, but was this about CSL?

OMG! According to the ABC, my favourite stock was wallowing at $7.31. Last time I checked it had been over $170. Some utter catastrophe had occurred. Should I hang on – a strategy that served me badly throughout the Great Financial Crisis, or sell and garner $1170 (less brokerage) towards my half-yearly electricity bill?

Surely, given Emma’s history and Michelle Guthrie’s “increased editorial oversight”, this $7.31 couldn’t have been just another ABC cock-up? Surely, as the ABC’s go-to guru on matters financial, she would checked the facts and details of her report before going to air?

There’s quite a difference between Emma’s $7.31 and the actual $183. It’s not like she mistook $183 for $138 or $173. If Emma knew just a tiny bit about the company sector, she would have known before going to air and, presumably, eyeballing her script, that $7.31 didn’t compute.

But why $7.31? At first I thought it was confusion with builder Downer EDL which had a $7.31 high on Friday. But the explanation is much simpler: $7.31 was CSL’s increase yesterday, which Emma presented as the actual price.

The ABC– all muscle, no fat – gets its share prices garbled not just occasionally but often. To the green/lefties there, sharemarket prices must be gobbledegook.[3] Their retirement lifestyle is assured by that 15.4% super contribution from the ABC – all muscle, no fat.[4]

So no-one there has noticed the CSL howler – I’ll demand a correction, just for entertainment. Oh, and Ms Guthrie, ramp up that editorial oversight a notch.

Tony Thomas’s book of essays, That’s Debatable – 60 Years in Print, is available here

[2] It became a double-header embarrassment last month when ABC political editor Andrew Probyn got busted by ACMA for his anti-Abbott rant last October

[3] More than 40 per cent of ABC journalists who answered a survey question about their political attitudes are Greens supporters, four times the support the minor party enjoys in the wider population.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/emma-youve-done-2/feed/18Royal Weddings: Things Have Changedhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/royal-weddings-things-changed/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/royal-weddings-things-changed/#commentsFri, 18 May 2018 04:29:41 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84717Eighty-one years ago, on the very day of Prince Harry’s betrothal, the British Cabinet rejected King Edward VIII's bid to wed the last royal American fiancée, Wallis Simpson. That Meghan Markle is a divorcee matters not at all, and that is as it should be

]]>Has the House of Windsor ever been so replete — and so at peace and full of promise? The 96-year-old consort, Prince Philip, has acquired a new hip and seems determined to regain his stride; the Queen has entered her 93rd year as if it were her 73rd; her heir, the Prince of Wales, about to be 70, has been confirmed as the next leader of the Commonwealth; his heir and daughter-in-law have produced their second spare, Prince Louis of Cambridge — the sovereign’s 18th descendant; and tomorrow the charismatic sixth-in-line, Prince Harry of Wales, takes a bride in the fabled family chapel of St George’s Windsor.

Every wedding, be it common or Royal, is an occasion for optimism. And so it was when Princess Anne married Captain Mark Philips in 1973; when Prince Charles wed Lady Diana Spencer in 1981; when Prince Andrew married Miss Sarah Ferguson in 1986. But then some matches have endured, the Queen’s own platinum bond is a shining example; the Wessexes and the Cambridges too; while the Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales have found contentment in their second marriages.

The marital fortunes of the children of our world leaders should be of no interest to serious observers, but when the system is governed by the hereditary principle, the strengths and flaws of the heirs are not just relevant but vital.

It is now a quarter of a century since HM’s annus horribilis — but it wasn’t just 1992; in fact most of the ’90s were pretty horribilis: Diana’s Squidgygate and Charles’s Camillagate tapes, his book, her book, their divorce; the Duchess of York’s wet toes, and the Yorks’ divorce; the Princess Royal’s divorce, her flight to Scotland to remarry; and finally the fire at Windsor Castle. None of these episodes could be said to be the Queen’s fault and yet she was engulfed by them all. As remote as it seems, any one of her children could have inherited the Crown and so as kingly/queenly alternatives they had to measure up.

Not since the reign of great-great grandmother Victoria has a sovereign had so many eligible living descendants. (Interestingly, another Louis – her great-grandson Prince Louis Mountbatten was her last godchild.) Even George III, whose Queen Charlotte bore him fifteen children (13 of whom survived to adulthood), had fewer legitimate heirs at his death in 1820.

But neither Victoria — nor, in fact, the next three generations — had to suffer the spotlight of media intrusion: flashbulbs and paparazzi, hackers and harassment. As some have learnt to their cost, even today, the Thai King and, significantly, his family, are shielded by strict laws of lèse majesté. The modern British Royal Family has enjoyed no such reverence and restraint and the press has had a wild time since the Nineties as the lives of the family came under the unrelenting glare of commentators and cameras.

The only occasion where her unblemished record came in danger of being lost was the aftermath of the death of Diana in 1997. As hysterical Britons left bouquets by the thousand at royal residences throughout the kingdom (one paper dubbed it ‘floral fascism’) the Queen remained remote at Balmoral. She persisted that Diana, stripped of her HRH, had not strictly been a member of the Royal Family since her divorce, and her obsequies were a matter for her family, the Spencers. Her priority, she thought, was to her grandsons who had just lost their mother. Her subjects thought otherwise and, inflamed by a baying press, with headlines imploring “MA’AM, SHOW US YOU CARE”, they wanted their sovereign in London, grieving with them. At the urging of her courtiers and on the advice of her Prime Minister, she returned early to London, allowed the Union Jack to flutter at half-mast, and broadcast to her people. (“What I say to you now as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart”) All was well – the monarchy was saved and, as one royal watcher put it, “The Queen was back in charge.”

And twenty-one years on, she remains so and will witness the first match between prince and actress since Grace Kelly conquered Monaco and its ruler in 1956. In other ways, this coupling is both unprecedented and groundbreaking.

Interestingly, eighty-one years ago on the very day of Prince Harry’s betrothal, the British Cabinet rejected King Edward VIII’s proposal for a morganatic marriage to the last royal American fiancée, Wallis Simpson. Like Wallis, Meghan Markle is a divorcée – having ended a nine-year relationship (including a marriage of two years) in 2013. Edward VIII’s abdication, and the elevation of his reluctant brother as George VI, stung the family and stiffened their hostility to divorce for half a century. Princess Margaret was the first victim. In 1992, Princess Anne, had to fly north to walk down the aisle of Crathie Kirk, near Balmoral; the Scots being more amenable to the marriage of a divorcée than the Anglican Church.

Even seven decades after Edward’s fall, Charles, his successor as Prince of Wales, was denied a wedding in St George’s, Windsor and had to make do with a blessing by the Archbishop of Canterbury. A dozen years on, all is changed and the current Archbishop, Justin Welby, has expressed his ‘absolute delight’, signalling his approval for a church wedding.

Harry should be indebted to his stepmother for paving the way, as a divorcee, to become the consort of a senior prince. In deference to Diana, Camilla eschewed the title, Princess of Wales, but she became, instead, Duchess of Cornwall and more significantly, HRH – an honour denied to Edward’s Wallis.

It is expected, as custom dictates, that the Queen will confer a dukedom on her grandson on the morning of his wedding. Sussex appears to be spare and the most appropriate (though one observer has asked why Harry should be saddled with a title suffused/suffixed with ‘sex’). Meghan will lose her first name and be formally transformed into HRH the Duchess of Sussex. Only divorce, or widowhood, will bring back Meghan. Another remarkable coincidence is that the Dukedom of Sussex was last conferred on Augustus Frederick, the sixth son of George III, on 27 November 1801, 216 years to the day of Harry’s engagement.

But what of this 36-year-old American? Not only was she born six days after the wedding of Harry’s parents — the Wedding of the Century – but on the birthday of his beloved great-grandmother, the Queen Mother (surely the best actress to have graced a family yet never the stage). She is the daughter of Doria Ragland, an African-American clinical therapist (who, just as exceptionally for women in the Royal Family, is a graduate), and Thomas Markle, a German, Dutch, English, Irish and Scottish television lighting director. Among his work is the long-running (and hopefully rather apt) comedy, Married …. with Children. Thomas and Doria separated when Meghan was two.

Meghan has proclaimed her bi-racial heritage and called on her fellow Americans to do the same. She has also expressed her shock that only five generations ago her ancestor lived as a slave on a Georgian plantation. Although there have been recent suggestions that George III’s bride, Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was of mixed race, it is astonishing that, while Harry’s great-great-great-great grandmother was Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, the British Dominions, and Empress of India; Meghan’s great-great-great grandfather was a slave. As Meghan told Elle magazine, on abolition in 1865, former slaves had to choose a name. “A surname, to be exact….the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name Wisdom.”

She grew up in Los Angeles, and, although not a Catholic (until recently, another impediment to royal marriage) Meghan was educated at a good Catholic girls’ school. She said of herself, “a California girl who lives by the ethos that most things can be cured with either yoga, the beach, or a few avocados.” This belies a steely determination and drive that led to a starring role in the U.S. legal drama, Suits, in which Meghan played a clever, ambitious young paralegal and part-time associate, Rachel Zane. Her on-screen colleague and lover, Mike Ross, proposed as early as Series 4, and she had to wait until Series 7 – episode 108 – to marry him.

Interestingly, Rachel is also Meghan’s first given name. It could well have been a case of ‘My Cousin Rachel’ when genealogists unearthed, as they inevitably do, a common descent from a 16th century Elizabeth Bowes, an ancestor via the Queen Mother.

Another key trait the couple has in common is their humanitarianism. Meghan is a global ambassador for World Vision Canada and a campaigner for gender equality as a women’s advocate for the UN. Meanwhile, Harry, a natural soldier and accomplished Apache helicopter pilot, has left the forces to devote himself to Invictus, the games for injured service man and women. As he has said, “The world needs Invictus, these guys need Invictus, I need Invictus.” He also has Sentebale, the charity that helps children with HIV and Aids; and Heads Together, a charity, which seeks to overcome the stigma of mental health.

This shared passion — not just for each other – but also for a better world will add not just lustre but depth to Britain’s Royal Family, which constantly needs to renew itself while remaining a steady model for its subjects. Harry and Meghan, with their charisma and glamour, will complement and sustain the dutiful, diligent, devoted Cambridges.

The decades ahead augur well. One can only wish the soon-to-be Sussexes every success.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/royal-weddings-things-changed/feed/7The ABC: Perfect in Every Wayhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-perfect-every-way/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-perfect-every-way/#commentsFri, 18 May 2018 03:26:17 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84710The ABC would have you believe its billion dollars-plus per year is barely adequate to underwrite the sterling stuff editorial director Alan Sunderland insists is so good, so far beyond reproach, that nothing about the national broadcaster needs to change. That's right, 'absolutely nothing!'

]]>Back in March, ABC Editorial Director Alan Sunderland decided to do his bit for colleagues’ morale with a little video hailing the national broadcaster as the magnificent institution he would like everyone to believe it really is. Quadrant Online transcribed this extraordinary effort and presents it below. As certain things aren’t mentioned — appallingly inaccurate and terminally biased reports, for starters — we couldn’t resist providing some background and links.

Read on to see what Mr Sunderland had to say — and what he didn’t say. Quadrant Online’s thoughts are in italics.

There are plenty of suggestions floating around at the moment that the ABC is bowing to government pressure and failing to do its job. You’ve probably read some of the stories and a few of you may even be thinking the same thing. These articles talk about pre-emptive buckle, that we self-censor to make sure we don’t annoy the government and we’re cowering in the face of budget cuts.

Plenty of suggestions, eh, Al? Well, yes, there have been some, but they’ve come from either the feral or taxpayer funded left – sites like The Conversation and New Matilda. Are these your preferred sources, Al? That would explain a lot about the ABC’s perspective.

One thing is true: this is a sensitive time for the ABC .

Why so “sensitive”? If you set about your job with a straight bat, without fear or partisan favour, as your Charter insists you must, what is there to worry about?

Discussions are about to begin with the government about funding arrangements for the next three years. There have been inquiries into our regional operations, …

The ones you’ve been shutting down anyway, you mean, to redirect resources to activities you rate more worthy than keeping Wagin, Port Augusta, Nowra, Morwell and Gladstone informed. You shuttered those bush bureaus in 2014 under no instructions but your own.

“… In the coming year, Australians will head to the polls for the next election. More than 80 per cent of Australians value the ABC, a point that shouldn’t be lost on anyone seeking government.”

That’s not pulling your head in, Al. That’s threatening a government with grief unless it hands over all the taxpayer cash to which you and she think your ABC is entitled.

I’d like to respond clearly and simply to that. It’s time to come clean.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Only 11 more steps to go.

As the editorial director of the ABC I want to be honest with you and tell you from my own perspective and in the view of the managing director, the chairman, the board and that of the whole leadership team what precisely we intend to do differently – just for a little while, just until we get our funding sorted and make it through the rest of the year. I want to talk about how our journalism might have to change in response to all this pressure. So here goes.

Come on, Al, get to the point. Leave the drama to whichever ABC mate bagged the latest production cheque for a series about an Aboriginal superhero and a much-discriminated-against race of metaphoric hairies. Oh, that’s right, you’ve done that one already!

Quick, better fetch some climate sceptics for the cameras. They’re thin on the ground in your talk shows, news bulletins and current affairs. When they are invited, it’s to be abused.

We’re here to question and to challenge – and particularly to challenge those whose decisions affect us all.

It was certainly a challenge for Steve Ciobo when you brought in convicted terrorist Zaky Mallah – drove him in and drove him home, if you remember – to bushwhack the minister on live TV with a question prepared and polished by your producers.

That doesn’t always win us friends, but it’s important work.

Good work if you can get it, Al. Your mate Gaven Morris, who has been complaining about the ABC not having two pennies to rub together, was pocketing $213,210, as of the end of 2013. Kirsten Aiken, his wife and a presenter on News 24, would be on a good screw too. Whatever else might be said of your ABC, it cannot be faulted for supporting family values, as this list of your partnered and cashed-up colleagues attests:

It’s our job and it’s the reason why we’re valued and trusted by over 80% of Australians.

We keep hearing about this 80% business, but is that really a telling metric? How about, for another perspective, you take the budget of, say, Tonightly and divide it by the number of viewers, which would illuminate how much it costs to attract a really, really small audience.

You might also count the number of f***s and c***s in order to calculate obscenities-per-dollar.

By the way, do you ABCers use that sort of language in conversation with Ms Guthrie? Heavens above, surely she doesn’t employ obscenities as a form of punctuation! Or maybe she does. Is that why she reckons its fit fare for Australian livingrooms? Is it why, when Minister Mitch Fifield complained, he received a reply from some patronising twerp to the effect that it was “comedy” , the implication being that he should do some work on his sense of humour.

We’ve never buckled to pressure or pulled our punches in the past and we’re not about to start now.

Ex-ABCer Jon Stephens, the bloke who molested an ABC child performer in a Gosford motel room paid for by the ABC and while on assignment for the ABC, hasn’t had a glove laid on him. Indeed, as Gerard Henderson has noted repeatedly, his conviction has never been mentioned by your newsreaders.

So, shouldn’t that be ‘never pulled our punches except when we find it convenient to avoid embarassment?’

Now, of course, we have to get it right. We have to be accurate and impartial.

But then we have to get on with the job, supporting each other and standing behind the public interest journalism we’ve always been known for.

Geoffrey Luck, a former ABC bureau chief, discovered what “supporting each other” means when he wrote to complain about a report and was told to drop dead by a functionary who didn’t like his tone. A neat, supportive way to make sure an ABC colleague didn’t have to answer embarrassing questions about, as Geoffrey put, his “travesty” of a report.

So we should all be united in this common endeavor, no matter how much the going gets tough. It has been tough and it will be tough.

When the going gets tough, the tough get … evasive, arrogant, selective, defiant and threatening.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-perfect-every-way/feed/4Eyeless in Gazahttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/eyeless-gaza/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/eyeless-gaza/#commentsThu, 17 May 2018 00:12:45 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84671It is quite the puzzle for Islamic apologists: how to cast Hamas' eagerness to march a lemming-like army of its own people, even small children, into border fences and Israeli guns? The solution: overlook Islamic scriptures' exhortations to grievance and barbarism

]]>Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears [read the religion of peace], whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal [read the religion of peace], we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat.– Winston Churchill

Tens of thousands of Gazans are attempting to storm into Israel. If they were to succeed many among them would rape and slaughter Israelis living in nearby towns. They are being urged on by Hamas leaders. The mobs (called “protestors” to torture the English language) are using petrol bombs and slingshots and burning tyres to provide cover. It’s all on the tele to be seen with those who have eyes to see.

Apparently, the British government has expressed concern about the violence and loss of Gazan life. Macron blamed Israel for the deaths of those storming the border. Julie Bishop called on Israel “to be proportionate in its response and refrain from excessive force.” It is in fact a miracle that so few Gazan lives have been lost. Imagine the carnage with the same mobs, with the same malign intent, coming up against a less disciplined and restrained army. Some young children have been killed. What the heck are their parents thinking bringing them to the front lines? Well, hold that thought pending Indonesia.

Meanwhile in the world of truth, outside of sanctimony and delusion, the White House blamed Hamas for the violence. Niki Haley walked out of the UN as the Palestinian representative got up to propagandise, having vetoed yet another of those anti-Israel resolutions. If you still don’t know why the world needs Trump you should. Unless, of course, you can’t get beyond his hairstyle.

Does anyone with even half a brain not understand that blood would be flowing in the streets if Hamas terrorists managed to get into Israeli towns. I visited Sderot in November, 2014. It is the closest Israeli town to the Gaza border. Twenty-eight thousand rockets had been fired at Sderot since 2000. I saw the piles of shrapnel kept at a local police station. I was told that the town is so close to the border that once you hear a “red alert” you have just fifteen seconds to find cover. All playgrounds have adjoining bomb shelters.

Barbarians are on their doorsteps and Ms Bishop calls on Israel to be “proportionate”. What does that mean exactly? Was Churchill proportionate enough for Bishop, I wonder. Let me see. If Israel were to ever lose, millions of Israeli Jews would be tortured, enslaved and killed. Do the sums, designer-gowned empty-head!

Back to the tragedy of children being effectively sacrificed by their parents at the Gaza border. You can argue about the intent in this case, but you can’t in Indonesia. It is beyond belief that a mother and father would strap explosives to their young children to blow up Christian churches. Or is it? Religious fanatics are capable of anything when Paradise awaits those who kill infidels. As Allah puts it: “Then smite their necks and smite of them each finger.” And, as his infallible messenger explains, “the man who dies without participating in jihad, who never desired to wage holy war, dies the death of a hypocrite.”

Despite the clear riding instructions that Allah and Mohammed give to their followers, The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, among the most grounded and gifted of foreign correspondents, can describe the ideology prompting heinous terrorist acts as an “utter perversion” of Islam. According to ‘The Religion of Peace’ website, Islamic terrorists have carried out more than 33,000 deadly attacks since 9/11. Exercises in perversion alright but not, I suggest, religious perversion.

It must be a devil of a puzzle to Islam’s apologists. All of the terrorists and their imam cheerleaders have obviously not read the same Koranic and Sunnah scripture as Mr Sheridan or Indonesian presidents who he writes will never “accept that terrorism represents anything like a legitimate strand of Islamic thought and practice.” Whether they accept it or not, killing non-believers is part and parcel of Islam. Can Allah and Mohammed have misspoke? I think not.

Unless we draw a direct line from the scripture to the problem, the problem cannot be tackled effectively. Do you mean to say that if Christians rather than Muslims had lived in the land now identified as Gaza, Israel and the West Bank prior to 1948 that Christian terrorists would be urging men, women and children to throw themselves against Israeli border fences? What a bountiful, prosperous and peaceful land it would be.

Islamic scripture provides grist for grievance and barbarism. It clearly corrupts men’s souls. It surely corrupted the souls of the mother and father sending their children to death in Indonesia. It has wreaked this havoc since the seventh century. So many great Western leaders of the past have known this. Now, excepting Trump, we have a bunch of know-nothing, panty-waisted appeasers ready only, on any distorted pretext, to reflexively spring at the throat of the only free and enlightened nation in the Middle East. And all the while, the tyrannous enemy inside and outside the gates plot their takeover. Jesus wept.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/eyeless-gaza/feed/61The PM ‘Soars’! Really?https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/pm-soars-really/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/pm-soars-really/#commentsMon, 14 May 2018 02:52:23 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84594The PM's backers are hailing the latest Newspoll, which registers a significant gain in his personal approval ratings. But here's a sobering fact: Turnbull remains four points less popular than Donald Trump and, on the latest numbers, his principle-free Liberals would still lose

]]>Losing poll #32 has come for this Team Turnbull Coalition government. The budget that did next to nothing to cut spending and which has only the palest of insipid hints of the big time Trump-style tax cuts has not delivered Mr. Turnbull that winning Newspoll he so desperately craves to halt the 32-and-counting tally. In fact Monday morning’s Australian, by far the country’s best source of news but nevertheless an overt supporter of Turnbull’s leadership, did all that was possible to paint a still-losing 49-51 Newspoll as good news for the Prime Minister, leading off its reporting of the losing poll with the headline ‘PM soars’. Yes, really.

But it wasn’t referring to the key two-party preferred outcome. That remained unchanged from the fortnight previous.

No, it was referring to Turnbull’s improved results in terms of approval/satisfaction as preferred PM, and these are massively flawed measures. Half the Labor Party’s supporters might well prefer Turnbull as PM, given he’s the most left-wing Liberal leader ever, but that doesn’t mean such Laborites will vote for the Coalition. Indeed, the two-party-preferred tells us they will not. All this poll item measures is appeal to many voters who won’t vote for you anyway, a bit like when a Liberal leader gets an easy ride from the ABC. You know it’s because he’s as left-wing as a Liberal can be and the ABC likes to encourage that sentiment wherever it is found, even in the party it won’t be supporting come election time.

As for the approval rating, Turnbull’s went from 31% to 39%. Is that really worth crowing about? I ask because the authoritative PEW survey in the US now has President Donald Trump at 43% approval, four points above Turnbull’s equivalent score. Now I don’t recall our national paper of record crowing about that. But then the Oz is seemingly much more comfortable with the Davos Man-type, ie., Turnbull, than with an arch disruptor like Trump.

For what it’s worth, though, notice that when you have a figure who bends over backwards, a la Malcolm, trying to shrink the political space with his opponents (by moving the party left, left, and further left), and when you swear off going to the wall to fight over really (not pretending to, but really) cutting spending, or paring back the world’s biggest immigration rate per capita, or fighting the stupid and impoverishing renewables and energy policies, you find yourself at 39 percent approval. And that’s it. Here is what hoisting the white flag on conservative principles gets you.

Trump, by contrast, actually fights on every front. He leaves the Paris Accord. He calls out the mainstream media for being wholly in the pocket of the progressive left (which it patently is, with a recent US survey showing Trump garnering over 90 percent negative coverage); he moves the US embassy to Jerusalem; he pulls out of the Iran deal. All these and more were his election promises, which he honoured in the full knowledge they would infuriate the usual suspects. Trump goes ahead anyway. He fights for his policies. And he is four points better off than Turnbull.

So that measure is meaningless and only the two-party preferred one matters. Or, if a leader’s approval does matter, what we learn is you are better off living by your core right-of-centre principles (which I realise are not Turnbull’s principles). If you fight for your beliefs, at least those on your own side of politics will approve of you. And they are the ones who count in the end.

Then there is the fact the Newspoll result is significantly out of whack with the Ipsos poll for Fairfax, out at the same time. Ipsos has the two-party-preferred ballooning Labor’s way to 54-46. That’s election massacre territory. In other words the gap widened in Shorten’s favour, the “unpopular” Shorten, says Ipsos. Why the big difference between Newspoll and Ipsos? I can’t say. I know that Newspoll not that long ago changed the way it calculates the likely flow of One Nation preferences, due to the Queensland election, and this can be taken as favouring a better Coalition result. But there were some pretty unique circumstances in the Sunshine State, so I am not so sure about this change or the numbers it is producing. Plus, I doubt this new methodology takes into account the former Liberal voters who deserted the party over Turnbull’s treachery and coup.

Speaking for myself and given the present leadership and policies, I will preference everyone above the Liberals (except the Greens), so in that negative sense I’ll be voting Labor. At least that’s my intention unless and until Turnbull is removed. Yes, Shorten is awful, appalling, untrustworthy and as many other unsettling things you might care to mention. But in the long-term Turnbull is moving the Libs too far left. It’s take your medicine now or later, as far as I am concerned.

Plus, if the Liberals get rid of Malcolm, they might actually win. With him at the helm, I can’t see it, however much the Oz puffs him up.

James Allan is Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland and the author of Democracy in Decline

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/pm-soars-really/feed/16Long on Spending, Short on Disciplinehttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/long-spending-short-discipline/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/long-spending-short-discipline/#commentsSat, 12 May 2018 03:03:49 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84487There is no evidence whatsoever that increases in income redistribution over the past 15 years have brought any improvement in national happiness, no matter by whichever yardstick you might care to measure it. Yet from Treasurer Scott Morrison, more of the same

]]>Governments normally sugar-coat budgets, packaging a combination of give-aways and, increasingly, cross subsidies, with boasts of how much of our money they are returning to us. Fifteen years ago, Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull sparred over whether the top income tax rate should be 30% (Shorten) or 35% (Turnbull). Neither, of course, had any resolve to confront the lower level of spending that such reduced funding would entail. Neither now seriously proposes a maximum less than 46%.

The key budget issue is spending. In terms of the Commonwealth, this has been a gradual, if interrupted, upward trajectory since the late 1960s. The government share was pushed along strongly in the ALP administrations, followed by the Coalition pegging back spending somewhat, but never totally. Spending commitments are made and undoing them is extraordinarily difficult. Politicians recoil from taking back funding from those who receive it and have come to consider it as no less than their right and due. The prospect they will change their votes looms large. As a result the Commonwealth spending share of GDP has risen from 18% in the early 1970s to today’s 25%, give or take a whisker of a percentage point

The last success in reducing expenditure was achieved by Peter Costello, who as treasurer in 2007 brought down spending to 23.1% of GDP in 2007 — this despite pressures from within the Coalition to splurge on buying votes and with an opposition in control of the Senate that was determined to exploit any opportunity to direct taxpayers’ money to worthy (i.e. vote-winning) causes.

“Keeping a tight rein on spending” is one of this year’s budget slogans. But the outcome is not encouraging. The table below illustrates how spending (excluding net capital investment) would have developed had we maintained the real (inflation- and population-adjusted) proportion of 2003/4, a level that was reached even before the share of spending had fallen to the Costello minimum.

The first thing to recognise is that, had we maintained a measure of discipline in keeping the spending share to that of 15 years ago, we would now be spending over $100 billion less — indeed, even more than $100 billion if the ‘off budget’ spending on roads, renewable energy and the NBN were to be included. This is a sizeable sum in the context of the nation’s $1,700 billion economy.

Not only would keeping the spending proportion constant eliminate the $18 billion deficit (optimistically forecast to be reduced in future years), it would mean more spending available to income-earners. Those seeking to divert money from earners to recipients falsely claim that, in doing so, overall income levels will increase. Sponsors of the notion that higher spending by governments is a wealth generator not only include the socialists you would expect, like Sally McManus and the ALP generally, but also, alas, prominent Liberals.

The fact is that such diversions never bring increased wealth. Permitting income earners to retain more of their wealth will bring enhanced incentives to work, together with a greater surplus for savings, hence investment. It would also raise the likelihood that Australia can break out of the lacklustre 1% per-capita growth to which our politicians have seemingly become reconciled.

Simply put, there is no evidence whatsoever that the increases in income redistribution over the past 15 years have brought any offsetting improvement in national happiness, no matter by whichever means you might care to measure it.

The obvious places to look at savings are those that have experienced the most rapid increases: immigration, regulatory agencies, transport and communication, housing and community amenities, education and foreign aid.

In the case of immigration the cost increases are dominated by “management of unlawful non-citizens” expenditures that are being reduced in line with the illegal immigrant numbers.

The regulatory agencies and new vanity projects seem to grow without interruption, imposing a massive compliance cost in addition to the revenues they consume.

Transport and communication is dominated by road projects which, on the basis of the hypothecation of specific vehicle taxes, would not be excessive.

Housing and community amenities is dominated by costs of housing, almost exclusively nowadays for those with special needs. In line with other housing costs, the expenditure is excessive because of planning restrictions on land which artificially boost new housing development costs.

Foreign affairs costs are dominated by the aid budget — $3.6 billion this year and $4.6 billion in 2019. Other than the small proportion of aid for emergency relief, none of this expenditure is warranted. Worse than that, it is counterproductive. No nation has ever achieved economic success on the back of aid disbursements, much of which ends up in payments to bureaucrats and oiling the wheels of Third World corruption.

The big expenditure items are health, education and welfare (including housing) which account for some 70% of total spending.

Education has been particularly disappointing. Real spending has increased by 90% over the past 15 years. Higher education (over $9 billion a year) has long passed the point where there are benefits from additional spending. In the case of schools, where the Commonwealth spends $20 billion a year, we have seen a massive increase without this being translated into any measureable improvement in outcomes relative to other countries. The Gonski reports noted that grim truth before, in defiance of logic and evidence, went on to advocate throwing even more after bad.

Social security is the largest item of spending. It is dominated by assistance to the aged ($67m billion), to people with disabilities ($48 billion), and to families ($37 billion). Expenditures for the aged and families are locked in and likely to increase over time. In regard to disability, the NDIS is still being developed and will require considerable attention and responsible decisions if it is not to grow considerably.

Health boasts many potential economies to be made, but achieving these has proven to be difficult and is most unlikely to become less so .

Government spending in Australia remains excessive. Institutionally, we have developed a framework biased in favour of greater spending while spurning fiscal discipline.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/long-spending-short-discipline/feed/16Budget 2018: Go Figurehttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/budget-2018-go-figure/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/budget-2018-go-figure/#commentsThu, 10 May 2018 08:34:43 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84427In essence, spending under the Coalition government has been increasing at about the same rate as GDP since 2013-14 with no sign of any intent to reduce the size of government. Treasurer Morrison has given this trend a once-over-lightly tickle but has not in any way slapped down spending

]]>A huge amount has been written about the 2018-19 Budget presented on Tuesday by Treasurer Scott Morrison as a 7 year plan to make personal income tax “lower, simpler and fairer” (see attached Morrison on Effect of Tax Cuts). But the proposed changes in the structure of the income tax system are not worth considering other than as possible thoughts for future budgets. There will be at least three more elections by 2025 and many thoughts raised or proposed about the structure. It is already apparent that the proposed changes in the tax treatment of those on high incomes will not get through the Senate and neither will the already proposed further reductions in company tax.

The proposed structural tax changes in this budget may, in part, be included to divert attention away from the absence of any significant changes in the levels of taxation and government expenditure included in the budget itself. The large proposed spending on infrastructure, of which Turnbull has sought to portray himself as instigator, does not impinge on the underlying cash result, which is estimated to now be in a miniscule surplus in 2019-20 (previously in 2020-21).

I wondered before the Budget was unveilled if it would meet the Coalition’s “small government” objective and suspected the widely foreshadowed reductions in taxes would be limited because of the failure of the Coalition to effect a more substantive reduction in the budget deficit of $48.5bn which Labor left it in 2013-14 and which was still at $23.6 bn (1.3 per cent of GDP) in the Mid-Year estimates for the current financial year (2017-18). I noted that expert analysts predicted that the reductions would likely be limited to only about $8bn, which would be a reduction of only about 2 per cent of total taxes.

In fact, the budget provides that, even after allowing for the much-flaunted income tax cuts, total individual income tax payments are estimated to increase by no less than 6.0 % in 2018-19. For the four years to 2021 the estimate of the cuts is only $11.6bn, which means that the tax cuts over those four years would only reduce the collection of income taxes by slightly more than 1 per cent from what they would otherwise be (for comparison, the estimate/projection of income taxes for the four years is now $954bn).

The cuts in total taxation over the four years are fractionally more than $11.6bn (see below the Tax Outlook published in Budget Paper No 1 for 2018-19). Overall, there is an increase in the proportion of national income (GDP) paid in total and income taxes. Total taxes and income taxes as a proportion of GDP are available from the budget papers as follows (income taxes in brackets).

The previous highest rate of total taxation was 24.3 per cent of GDP in each of 2004-05 and 2005-06, when the mining boom lifted incomes. The proposed maximum tax by Morrison is an arbitrary 23.9 per cent of GDP which, strangely, would allow for an increase in total taxes of 0.8% of GDP, or $17bn, between now and 2021-22.

Tax outlook

Table 2 (below) reconciles the 2018-19 Budget estimates of tax receipts with the 2017-18 Budget and the 2017-18 MYEFO estimates. Since the 2017-18 MYEFO, tax receipts, including new policy, have been revised up by $8.2 billion in 2018-19 and $12.0 billion over the four years to 2021-22. Excluding new policy, tax receipts have been revised up by $8.0 billion in 2018-19 and $25.9 billion over the four years to 2021-22.

Expenditure and Net Debt

The foregoing assessment of the Budget in regard to tax cuts has similarities when the provisions for expenditure are examined. This shows that expenditures are estimated t o increase by 3.1 per cent in real terms in 2018-19, following an increase of 2.7 per cent real in the current year. In essence, spending under the Coalition government has been increasing at about the same rate as GDP since 2013-14 and hence has not shown any sign of reducing the size of government.

The forward estimates do provide for a slower growth after 2018-19, but the next election is likely to see a return to keeping pace with GDP. With revenues estimated to be higher than spending from 2019-20 on, there is an opportunity to start reducing net debt as the Howard-Costello government did (by 2005-06 net debt was almost zero and the federal government became a net assets holder).

Net debt increased under the Labor government from 2009-10 to about 13 per cent of GDP in 2013-14 and an estimated 18.4 per cent in 2018-19. It is now estimated to fall to 14.7 per cent in 2021-22, but that depends on lowering spending and/or saving more from collections of taxes.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/budget-2018-go-figure/feed/7Obama’s Big Ideahttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/obamas-big-idea/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/obamas-big-idea/#commentsWed, 09 May 2018 23:34:00 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84375Barack Obama’s policy was to ask Iran to show some flexibility, give good relations with America a chance, just as he sought to make nice with Cuba, Russia, China, even the Muslim Brotherhood. Odious but not stupid, the mullahs knew a sucker when they saw one

]]>Watching President Trump scupper the Iran Deal made me wonder where we would be today if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election. I was reminded of fired FBI Director James Comey’s praise for the defeated Democratic nominee at a Town Hall meeting in April of this year: “Hillary Clinton is more meshed in, trained in, respectful of the norms and traditions that I’m so worried about being eroded today.” Lucky, I thought, Donald Trump is not “meshed in, trained in, respectful of the norms and traditions” that constituted the Obama Doctrine.

Barack Obama’s Big Idea was to ask the US’s traditional adversaries – Russia, Iran, Cuba, China, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and so on – to show some flexibility and give good relations with America a chance. His entreaty, however, was interpreted by Uncle Sam’s traditional adversaries – or, should we say, “partners in peace” – to mean the US, the self-identified guilty party in international relations, wanted a second chance. The Islamic Republic of Iran, eventually, decided it would play along with Obama’s “feel good” diplomacy, and entered into negotiations with the P5+1 (UN Security Council members plus Germany).

For the Obama administration, and for virtually every progressive we-are-the-world Westerner, the Iran Nuclear Deal was what we had been waiting for, the moment when hope and change meet and the promise of a global people’s community takes a giant step forward. Older hands warned that this was all a recipe for disaster, as I wrote in “Wiser Men on the Iranian Deal” back in May 2015.

But Barack Obama, the apotheosis of trendy left-wing millennialism, could not be dissuaded from his heal-the-world mission. He and Secretary of State John Kerry pushed ahead with a deal, their Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in July, 2015. Given that Tehran retained the right to keep developing a delivery system for nuclear weaponry (that is, it’s a ballistic- and cruise-missile program), inadequate international oversight of its nuclear project and a sunset clause that, more or less, ensured a nuclear-weapons breakout ten years’ down the track, it was reasonable to refer to JCPOA as “Obama’s Munich Moment”.

Obama’s Big Idea was that the nuclear deal, concomitant with the release of billions of dollars of frozen Iran assets and the cessation of Western sanctions, would encourage the Iranian leaders to join the global people’s community as a responsible member. This is what President Obama said with the ink was barely dry on the deal:

The path of violence and rigid ideology, a foreign policy based on threats to attack your neighbours or eradicate Israel – that’s a dead end. A different path, one of tolerance and peaceful resolution of conflict, leads to more integration into the global community, and the ability of the Iranian people to prosper and thrive.

Now we know for sure what we should have known for sure from the beginning: Barack Obama, a professorial-style leftist ideologue, was quite possibly the most dangerous Leader of the Free World imaginable.

Iran, of course, took the billions of dollars released to it through the JCPOA and stepped up its sponsorship of militias in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. Not even Latin America has been safe from Iran’s anti-US adventurism. And all the while the Iranians have persisted with their Death-to-America and Death-to-Israel mania, which is not a treatable malady so much as a terminal psychosis. As Jonathan S. Tobin once politely enquired: “Has Obama read the Khamenei Palestine book?”

One additional indignity was dealt to Obama in August, 2016, when his State Department – while it wasn’t busy conspiring against the Trump campaign – forked out $400 million in cash to secure the release of American hostages in Iran. The JCPOA had bought zero good will from the theocrats who rule Iran. Still, no need to worry, because the State Department at the time assured the world that while the money did not constitute a “ransom payment”, the prisoner release was “contingent” on it. Well, that’s okay then.

The impediment to world peace, nevertheless, was not Barack Obama’s strategic patience but Donald Trump’s volatile impatience – or, at least, that is how the narrative goes. Thus, the mainstream media, Democrats (including those who opposed it in the first place) and European leaderset al are apoplectic about the threat to JCPOA. Naturally, Obama calls Trump’s decision a “serious mistake” while John Kerry says it risks “dragging the world back to the brink”. That said, it is not so easy refuting the specifics of President Trump’s address, even if they are not respectful of the norms of the Obama Doctrine: “At the heart of the deal was a giant fiction that a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear-energy program.”

Far more credible than Barack Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal is this: Tehran will never dare revive its nuclear-weapons program while Donald John Trump remains in the White House.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/obamas-big-idea/feed/12Give Us Your Violent Masseshttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/give-us-violent-masses/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/give-us-violent-masses/#commentsWed, 09 May 2018 06:48:44 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84350Confronted by gang mayhem, as happens regularly now in Melbourne, are police to wade in with stun guns and truncheons? More than an officer's career would be worth, once legal-aid activists weigh in with cries of 'Racism!' and the brass writes cheques to miscreants. This need never have come about

]]>Police were called to a rowdy party in North Melbourne at the end of April. Apparently up to fifty Sundanese youths were involved. The police got them to leave the premises but they created mayhem outside, including damaging police cars. The police took refuge in the townhouse rather than confront the youths. At least that is the way it was reported in The Age and in other news outlets. Also, according to a report in The Age, it was estimated that seven police officers originally attended the scene.

The precise facts of the case are not pertinent to my theme. What is pertinent is that the police were clearly well outnumbered. I heard some commentators imply criticism of the police, deflected onto those giving them riding instructions, for not confronting the thugs in the street. This is plain silly.

Police officers are human beings just like you and me. If possible they would like to end their shifts without incurring life-changing injuries. I once ran into the back of car in the centre of Adelaide. Three policemen where talking to a group of five or six disorderly Aboriginal men on a corner outside a pub. I called one of the policemen over to do the right thing and report the accident. He was young. He couldn’t have cared less about my prang and returned quickly to his colleagues. It was obvious. He was (very) visibly nervous at the prospect of tangling with five or six drunken Aboriginals when he was one of just three.

About week after the North Melbourne incident it was reported that some 150 youths of “African appearance” (presumably not disciples of Al Jolson) trashed a house in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray while the police stood by. Apparently, the police told the owner of the rented property that they could not enter unless she had proof that damage was being done. A strange business perhaps but would you like to face up to 150 youths, African or otherwise, behaving riotously unless backed by a SWAT team and tanks?

My point is that being seriously outnumbered, as was the case in North Melbourne and Footscray, is an impossible situation for the police unless there is confidence in an implied social contract between both sides. That social contract, which we have grown up with, is that the police will only act in accordance with their authority and, when they so act, that civilians – even when well outnumbering the police – will comply with lawful directions. Or at the very least will not turn on the police in a physically violent way.

I am prepared to guess that Sudanese youths running wild have not heard of this social contract. I am very sure the police suspect that they haven’t. What then exactly are the police to do? Perhaps they should venture forward with Tasers and truncheons at the ready. Good luck with that one. Of course, police have guns. But imagine what the media would make of them drawing them, never mind firing even warning shots? The police officers concerned would risk losing their careers and perhaps their freedom.

Our society, as its structured, cannot handle large gangs wreaking violence in public places. Gang members who injure and kill only each other is one thing. It is quite another if they run riot on the streets. We are not set up to handle it. Societies that are, Central American republics for example, look different to ours. You often see pictures on the TV of police weighing into rioters without a care for their welfare. We might tut-tut but exactly what do you do when large numbers of people are intent on violence?

There is no benign answer. In the case of the recent gang violence (and, let’s not forget, home invasions) in Melbourne, the answer would have been to have never let Sudanese refugees enter the country in the first place, or any refugees who pose the slightest risk to civilised values. Australian citizens come first, or they should. Unfortunately, successive governments have put their citizens at risk in order to satisfy do-gooder international conventions. That’s why Trump is so refreshing in simply trying to put Americans first. How novel is that nowadays! Australians injured by Sudanese violence should rightfully direct their ire at the political class who have conspired to put their safety in jeopardy.

As it is, there is little option but to go on increasing the militarisation of police forces. That’s what Islamic terrorism has already brought, together with intrusive searches, inconveniences and bollards. Sudanese gangs just up the ante. At question, I suppose for us ordinary Joes, is who next? Which people from which dysfunctional culture will be chosen next by politicians to supplement our population.

A passing thought. I doubt we would find white South African farmers trashing houses and running wild in the streets. Just a guess.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/give-us-violent-masses/feed/10Adolf Hitler’s Debt to Karl Marxhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/adolf-hitlers-debt-karl-marx/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/adolf-hitlers-debt-karl-marx/#commentsWed, 09 May 2018 02:55:20 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84324This week, when people who should know better were marking the birth of modern Communism's founder, his socialist heirs were flinging the standard slur that conservatives are 'Nazis'. To find the Austrian Corporal's real legatees they should look much closer to home

]]>May 5 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, author of Das Kapital and the spiritual leader of Communism, a totalitarian ideology that killed more than 100 million people in the 20th century alone. We should expect the European Union oligarchs to show a bit more respect for the innocent victims of Communism. And yet, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the European Commission attended the celebration marking the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth in Trier and openly declared that he was ‘celebrating the father of Communism’. The media also reports that the EU President defended Marx by arguing that he is not “responsible” for mistakes and atrocities committed in his name after his death. He delivered ‘an impassioned speech praising the legacy of the German philosopher’.[1]

The celebration of Marx by the European Commission President is particularly appalling for the European countries which suffered for decades under Communist dictatorships. And yet, Marx is not just the ‘father of Communism’. He is also the ‘mother’ of Nazi-Fascism, another ideology that claimed millions of lives in that continent. Indeed, all the intellectual frontrunners of Nazi-Fascism were radical Marxists at some stage of their lives. Like Marx, the early fascists condemned economic freedom and individual liberty. Above all, they agreed with Marx that capitalism should be eliminated because it supposedly favour only the ‘unproductive classes’ of industrialists at the expense of the working class.

Marxist Roots of Nazi Fascism

The Fascist movement was introduced in Italy after the World War I by Benito Mussolini. Raised by a Marxist mother, at the age of 29 Mussolini managed to become ‘one of the most effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe’.[2] In 1912, he was elected the head of the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia, opposing ‘bourgeois’ parliaments and proposing that Italy should be thoroughly Marxist. ‘Marx’, wrote Mussolini, ‘is the father and teacher … He is the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence’.[3] Of his own political aspiration, Mussolini remarked: ‘Iwish to prepare my country and accustom it to war for the day of the greatest bloodbath of all, when the two basic hostile classes will clash in the supreme trial’.[4]

According to French historian François Furet, ‘Communism and Fascism grew up on the same soil, the soil of Italian socialism’. As Furet also explains, ‘Mussolini was a member of the revolutionary wing of the Socialist movement prior to supporting Italy’s entry into the Great War; then, immediately afterward, he found himself in violent conflict with the Bolshevik-leaning leaders of his former party’.[5] On the eve of that war, Mussolini predicted: ‘With the unleashing of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the sixth great power: the socialist revolution’.[6]

However, the coming of that war coupled with his determination to bring Italy into it resulted in Mussolini losing his official position within the Italian Socialist Party.[7] As a result, on March 23, 1919, he was forced to create the Fascist Movement which promised, among other things, the partial seizure of all finance capital; the control over the national economy by corporative economic councils; the confiscation of church lands; and agrarian reform.[8] And yet, Lenin’s economic failures in the Soviet Union had turned Mussolini away from direct expropriation of industry. Still, Mussolini’s greatest aspiration was to establish a socialist utopia that should dictate how private business would be allowed to operate.[9] According to the British historian, Paul Johnson,

Mussolini now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the pre-war ‘vanguard élite’ Marxism and syndicalism (workers’ rule) which was to remain to his death the most important single element in his politics.[10]

In true Marxist fashion Mussolini pledged ‘to make history, not to endure it’.[11] Lenin, another of Marx’s most successful disciples, once described his Bolshevik party as a highly disciplined and centralised movement. Similarly, Mussolini aspired to establish a ‘vanguard minority’ formed by highly-trained revolutionary leaders. Through the adoption of symbolic invocations the fascist leaders were expected to raise the consciousness of the Italian proletariat.[12] Above all, Mussolini entirely agreed with Lenin that violence was a valid means to achieve ultimate power and complete dominance.[13]

In 1920s another socialist movement followed in the wake of the Italian Fascists. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (National-Sozialistische Deutsche Abeiterpartei — NSDAP) was created as a mass movement to bring together the ideals of nationalism and socialism. It added to their nationalistic type of socialism the specific element of racism, anti-Semitism in particular. Co-written in 1920 by Adolf Hitler and Anton Drexler the NSDAP 25 Points Manifesto constituted the ‘unalterable and eternal objectives of National Socialism’. Besides anti-Semitic remarks, the manifesto of the national-socialists included government expropriation of land without compensation; nationalisation of basic sectors of the national industry; the abolition of market-based lending; and the confiscation of all income unearned by work.[14] That being so, in a famous speech on Labour’s Day on 1st May 1927, Hitler declared:

We are socialists. We are enemies of today’s capitalistic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.[15]

The attempted combination of socialist and nationalist policies was not alien to German political culture. The welfare state in its modern form actually originated in 19th –century Germany and precisely from this sort of combination.[16] The country’s statesman and militaristic Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, pioneered what is now recognised as the modern welfare state through a series of compulsory insurance schemes enacted in the 1880s, including work accidents, health, disability, and old age. Bismarck called these measures “State Socialism”, thus declaring in 1882: ‘Many of the measures which we have adopted to the great blessing of the country as Socialistic, and the State will have to accustom itself to a little more Socialism yet’.[17] He wanted the German workers to feel more grateful to the state authorities, and therefore to him. It was the collapse of this statist model created by Bismarck in the 1930s that ushered the most oppressive of all forms of welfare state: National Socialism.[18] As German historian and political scientist Götz Aly points out,

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was propagating two age-old dreams of the German people: national and class unity. That was the key to the Nazi popularity, from which they derived the power they needed to pursue their criminal aims. The idea of the Volkstaat – a state of and for the people – was what we would call a welfare state for Germans with the proper racial pedigree. In one of his central pronouncements, Hitler promised “the creation of a socially just state,” a model society that would “continue to eradicate all social barriers.[19]

The intellectual frontrunners of Nazism were the German socialists who believed that capitalism lowered the birth rate of the working class, ‘the best of the nation’. From the time the Nazis achieved power state ownership had increased exponentially in both the war and non-war sectors of the national economy.Such economic policies dramatically expanded the control of the state over prices, labour, materials, dividends and foreign trade. These policies restricted both competition and private ownership, in an attempt to redirect all segments of the economy toward a policy of ‘general welfare’.[20]

So it is not a surprise that the unionised workers’ movement were strongly supportive of Hitler and the Nazi regime as a whole. On 1st May 1933, Labor’s Day, thousands of such workers packed Berlin’s Tempelhof district at the behest of their union bosses to provide a ‘gigantic demonstration’ of support for Hither and the Nazi leadership. Those unionised workers were directly addressed by Hitler, ‘who spoke of the country’s rebirth and of taming capitalist exploitation in order to make way for the creation of a new social and economic order’.[21] As Richard Pipes points out:

The Nazis appealed to the socialist traditions of German labor, declaring the worker ‘a pillar of the community’, and the ‘bourgeois’ — along with the traditional aristocracy — a doomed class. Hitler, who told associates that he was a ‘socialist’, had the party adopt the red flag and, on coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday: Nazi Party members were ordered to address one another as ‘comrades’ (Genossen). His conception of the party was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization, a Kampfbund, or ‘Combat League’ … His ultimate aim was a society in which traditional classes would be abolished, and status earned by personal heroism. In typically radical fashion, he envisaged man re-creating himself: ‘Man is becoming god … Man is god in the making’.[22]

Similar to their Communist counterparts, the Nazis extolled the alleged virtues of the working class and aspired to create ‘a new society and a new man’. They also believed that the chasm between the classes would be bridged via the replacement of liberal ‘individualism’ with a national system of socialist values and ‘spirit of camaraderie’. National Socialism was strongly based on the supremacy of the community over the individual, so that the individual should be entirely subordinated to the organic interests of the community, an idea which was encapsulated in the famous Nazi motto: ‘Common welfare before individual interest’. Hitler himself expressed such a view in a 1939 speech: ‘The liberty of the individual ends where it starts to harm the interests of the collective’, Hitler stated. In this case the abstract ‘liberty’ of the Volk always take precedence over the liberty of the individual.[23] ‘It is thus necessary,’ declared the Führer in a public speech on 7 October 1933,

that the individual should come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole … that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual … [W]e understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man’.[24]

In his youth, Hitler studied how the Marxist-oriented Social Democrats manipulated the crowds in his native Austria. From that observation he developed his own method of crowd psychology. Hitler, of course, was a gifted orator who could ‘whip the masses up to a frenzy of faith and enthusiasm’.[25] And yet, in both public and private conversations Hitler was fully able to acknowledge his great debt to Marxist ideology.[26] In a November 1941 speech Hitler even declared: ‘Basically, National-Socialism and Marxism are the same’.[27]On another occasion, Hitler commented:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit … The difference between [Marxists] and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers’ sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets written specially for the comprehension of the masses: all these new methods of political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All I had to do is take over these methods and adapt them to our purpose.[28]

As can be seen, there are important commonalities between National Socialism and Marxism. It is therefore deeply fallacious to argue that Nazism is the polar opposite of Communism, or that the Nazis were some sort of ‘reactionary capitalist counterrevolutionaries’.[29] In truth, the Nazis were revolutionary socialists who received no support from the German industrialists, even from of those who later benefited from the country’s rearmament. The Krupp family, for instance, financially opposed Hitler at the 1932 German presidential election.

Because of ideological similarities the German Communists were happily prepared to faithfully collaborate with the Nazis against the Weimar Republic. The Nazis were greatly assisted by the Communists when the latter refused to make common cause with the Social Democrats.[30] Working under strict orders from Moscow, the Communists regarded the Social Democrats as their major political opponents, and not the Nazis. Such a position weakened any resistance against the Nazi movement and ultimately paved the way for the Nazi takeover from which the Communists themselves became one its first victims. In the clash between Social Democrats, Communists and Nazis, writes Richard Pipes:

Moscow consistently favored the Nazis over the Social Democrats, whom it called ‘social Fascists’ and continued to regard as its principal enemy. In line with this reasoning, it forbade the German Communists to collaborate with the Social Democrats. In the critical November 1932 elections to the Reichstag (Parliament), the Social Democrats won over 7 million votes and the Communists 6 million: their combined votes exceeded the Nazi vote by 1.5 million. In terms of parliamentary seats, they gained between them 221, against the Nazi 196. Had they joined forces, the two left-wing parties would have defeated Hitler at the polls and prevented him from assuming the chancellorship. It thus was the tacit alliance between the Communists and the National Socialists that destroyed democracy in Germany and brought Hitler to power.[31]

Instead of joining forces with the Social Democrats, the Communists actually voted together with the Nazis as a parliamentary block in the Reichstag (German Parliament).[32] Such a mutual support was illustrated in more dramatic terms on 12 September 1932, when Ernst Göring, now elected as President of the Reichstag, helped orchestrate a successful vote of no confidence in the von Papen government by which a Nazi-Communist coalition voted together to dismiss the cabinet.[33]As Paul Johnson points out,

The only notice the Communists usually took of the Nazis was to fight them in the streets, which was exactly what Hitler wanted. There was something false and ritualistic about these encounters … In the Reichtstag, they combined to turn debates into riots. Sometimes collaboration went further … Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power.[34]

Although Hitler condemned the incarnation of Marxism in Soviet Russia, he had no problem to describe his party as socialist in nature. What Hitler despised in Marxism was not its economic doctrine, but rather the idea that ‘working men have no country’. Indeed, the great divide between Nazism and Communism is not so much over economic particulars, but over the specific kind of socialism to be adopted. Whereas Communism embraces the idea of InternationalSocialism, the Nazis dreamed of a National Socialism which despises everything deemed ‘supranational’. For example, in a 1935 article published in the daily Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, described his party as ‘a party of revolutionary socialists’.[35] The only incompatible difference between the Nazis and the Communists, Goebels argued, was the supposed internationalism of the latter as compared to the fierce nationalism of the former.[36] Even so, Goebbels wanted to work with the Soviets against, as he saw it, ‘Jewish power in the West’.[37] Such a statement may on first glimpse seem rather extraordinary but, as Friedrich Hayek recounts:

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National-Socialism — Fitche, Rodbertus, and Lassalle — are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism … From 1914 onwards there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hardworking labourer and idealist youth into the national-socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. The war hysteria of 1914, which, just because of the German defeat, was never fully cured, is the beginning of the modern development which produced National-Socialism, and it was largely with the assistance of old socialists that it rose during this period.[38]

The Nazis wished to forge a socialist unity among the German Volk. The word Volk meant ‘people’ but in the more specific sense of an ethnic or racial community. For the Nazis, Volk was defined not just by means of cultural characteristics but primarily as a result of biological traits. The German Volk was basically a synonymous for the so-called Aryan race.[39] According to Hitler, Germany should become a nation of ‘one race’ where all class distinctions would be eliminated.[40] Hence, the German people should not be blamed for their current troubles, since all these troubles could be corrected in a classless society in which the strong leader, who had emerged from themselves, was able to gain power at the head of a national revolution.[41]

Curiously, Soviet Russia actually collaborated with Nazi Germany against Poland through the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which was signed in August 1939.[42] So much so that Stalin even returned to Nazi Germany the German Communists who sought refuge in the Soviet Union.[43] The Nazi regime found in its Soviet counterpart ‘a ready model for the one-party state’.[44] Back in those days, all over the world, ‘Communist Parties reversed their anti-Nazi policy, preaching peace with Germany at any price, and actively sabotaging the war-effort when it came: at the height of the Nazi invasion of France, Maurice Thorez, head of the French CP, broadcast from Moscow begging the French troops not to resist’.[45]

One of the the factors exploited by Hitler in the elections of 1932–33 was the general fear amongst the German people of a communist takeover. One of the reasons as to why Hitler aimed first to eliminate the ‘Left’, before he went after the ‘Right’, was the Nazi appeal to the same social base as Communism, as well as the use of similar language and the same categories as their Communist counterparts.[46] Back in those days it seemed as if German society was politically splitting apart as support not just for the Nazis but also for the Communists increased.[47] By January 1932, more than six millions Germans were unemployed.[48] And when a workman was unemployed at that time, then there was only one thing left, said Johannes Zahn, then a young economist, ‘either he became a Communist or he became an SA man [i.e., a Nazi Storm Trooper].’[49]

Marxist Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism

Whereas Hitler saw ‘race’ as the primary instrument of social struggle, Marx saw class as the key to such a struggle. And yet, Marx wasn’t entirely averse to the idea of a ‘master race’. On the contrary, as Marx himself pointed out: ‘The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way … They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust’.[50] Marx supported English imperialism in India simply because he thought the Indians were racially inferior to their colonizers. Although ethnically Jewish, Marx often resorted to racist phrases such as ‘dirty Jew’ and ‘Jewish Nigger’ in order to describe his political adversaries.[51] Of the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx commented:

It is not perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.[52]

In On the Jewish Question Marx endorsed the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian Left, Bruno Bauer, who demanded that the Jews should immediately abandon Judaism. In his essays Marx attacked free enterprise for apparently ‘Judaizing’ the whole of Europe, and, in effect, ‘dissolving earlier forms of solidarity and turning the Christians of Europe into this own caricature of Jews’.[53] For Marx, the ‘money-Jew’ was ‘the universal anti-social element of the present time’. ‘To ‘make the Jew impossible’, Marx contended, it was necessary to abolish the ‘very possibility’ of the kind of money activities which allegedly produced Judaism.[54]

Marx believed that Judaism would have to disappear before capitalism could be finally eradicated. For the Communist utopia to become a reality, Marx thought, it is necessary to eliminate ‘the Jewish attitude to money’. ‘In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself’, Marx proclaimed.[55] Such a theme is repeated over and over throughout Marx’s writings; and so much so that it is perfectly possible to demonstrate that modern anti-Semitism is actually a derivative of Marxist ideology. According to Paul Johnson:

Anti-Semitism seems to have made its headway at a time when the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin’s principle of Natural Selection to evolve ‘laws’ to explain the colossal changes brought about by industrialism, the rise of the megalopolis and the alienation of huge, rootless proletarians. Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race. Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive of these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation for all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist-nationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti-Semitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for reasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particular section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack.[56]

It was rather natural for Marx to call his political adversaries ‘vermin’ and ‘reactionaries’, who deserved to be punished for retarding the ‘march of history’.[57] Marx asserted that dialectical materialism could be used to describe not only the evolution of economic systems (each with its own social contradictions produced by ongoing class conflict), but also the evolution of the different human races.[58] A rigid doctrinaire, Marx made no secret of his intolerant attitude towards anyone who dared to disagree from him. ‘Criticism’, wrote Marx, ‘is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy it wishes not to refute but to destroy’.[59]

Marxist Roots of Modern Genocide

The goal of Marxism is not to promote human rights but to criticise the putative structures of socio-economic domination. In such a context, in Principles of Communism Engels described the idea of human rights as a ‘fraudulent mask’ to legitimise socio-economic exploitation. Indeed, all the most cherished values of democratic societies, including personal freedom and the rule of law, were denounced as nothing but ideological tools for legitimising an exploitive socio-economic system.[60] Along with Engels, Marx advocated that that the idea of individual rights and freedoms are ideological constructs that make people more selfish. What Marx had in mind was explained by a well-known Marxist theorist of the last century, George Lukacs:

The ‘freedom’ of the men who are alive now is the freedom of the individuals isolated by the fact of property which both reifies and is itself reified. It is a freedom vis-à-vis the other (no less isolated) individuals. A freedom of the egoist, of the man who cuts himself off from others.[61]

Coming from such a premise the idea of human rights can be approached as a class-conditioned category. These rights are not fixed but evolve according to the progressive stages of class warfare. In On the Jewish Question, Marx boldly stated: ‘The so-called rights of man are simply the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community’. These rights are not God-given or unalienable, but founded upon the ‘separation of men from men; it is the right of such separation’.[62] Thus Marx stated that they rest ‘not on association of Man with Man, but on the separation of Man from Man’.[63] ‘If power is taken on the basis of rights’, he wrote in The German Ideology:

… then right, law, etc, are merely the symptoms of other relations upon which state power rests. The material life of individuals … their mode of production and form of interest which eventually determine each other … this is the real basis of the State … The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides having to constitute their power in the form of the State, have to give their will … a universal expression as the will of the State, as law.[64]

Can Marxists therefore believe in the universality of human rights? After all, Marx himself argued that the ‘narrow horizon of bourgeois right’ should be entirely eliminated. He fiercely denied that any right could have a practical meaning apart from its own historical context. In other words, a given right exists in so far as the dominant class decides to create it, to accept it, and then to allow it to exist.[65] As noted by François Furet,

What … Marx criticized about the bourgeoisie was the very idea of the rights of man as a … foundation of society’. Marx regarded such rights as ‘a mere cover for the individualism governing capitalist economy. The problem was that capitalism and modern liberty were both subject to the same rule, that of freedom or plurality … and he impugned it in the name of “humanity’s lost unity”.[66]

Instead of supporting the universality of human rights, Marxism declares the abolition of objective morality.[67] Marx despised any objective standard of ethical or moral behaviour.[68] In The German Ideology Marx actually mocked the whole idea of objective morality, as an ‘unscientific’ obstacle to the advancement of revolutionary socialism. Rather, he elevated socialism as the only ‘basic good’ that, accordingly, would have ‘to eliminate the conditions of morality and circumstances of justice’.[69] This amounts, in practice, to an attack on non-relativist ethics that ‘undermines the sense of personal responsibility, and of duty towards a settled and objective moral code, which was at the centre of nineteenth-century European civilization’.[70] That being so, ‘Marx, and subsequent Marxists have singled out morality as ideological and relative to class interests and particular modes of production’.[71] According to Marx, writes legal philosopher Michael Freeman,

… all that ‘basic laws’ would do is furnish principles for the regulation of conflicting claims and thus serve to promote class compromise and delay revolutionary change. Upon the attainment of communism the concept of human rights would be redundant because the conditions of social life would no longer have need of such principles of constraint. It is also clear (particularly in the writings of Trotsky) that in the struggle to attain communism concepts like human rights could be easily pushed aside — and were.[72]

In this sense, the undercurrent of violence manifested by Communist regimes represent a mere projection of the Marxist foundations of moral relativism and lawlessness. As noted by law professor Martin Krygier, the very notion that law should be used to restrain government power is utterly ‘alien to Marx’s thought about what law did or could do, alien to his ideals, and alien to the activities of communists in power’.[73] As Krygier also explains, the disdain of such Communist regimes for the rule of law ‘is no mere accident but is theoretically driven. The writings of Marx had nothing good to say about the rule of law; it generated no confidence that law might be part of a good society; it was imbued with values which made no space for those that the rule of law is designed to protect’.[74]

In countries governed by Marxist principles the normative context has invariably resulted in the absolutisation of power. Communist regimes do not answer to a higher law or principle apart from the idea of ‘advancing socialism’. Such regimes are controlled by a small elite of Marxist political rulers who ultimately decide who shall live and who shall die for ‘belonging to an enemy class’ or for being ‘socially undesirable’.[75] These mass killings are justified by the Marxist dogma that a new world is coming into being so that everything that assists its difficult birth is morally allowable.[76] Marx himself contended that ‘the present generation resembles the Jews whom Moses led through the wilderness. It must not only conquer a new world, it must also perish in order to make room for the people who are fit for a new world’.[77]Seen from this perspective, ‘existing humanity was debris, the refuse of a doomed world, and killing it off was a matter of no consequence’.[78] In Russia and elsewhere Marxists were therefore prepared to sacrifice millions of human lives for the Marxist ideal of a ‘new man’. To realise such utopian goals, everything is valid including the physical elimination of ‘the sorry specimens that populate the corrupt world’.[79]

In Nazi Germany, the first targets of mass extermination were the crippled and the retarded, and then the Jews. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, the primary victims were the so-called ‘enemies of the people’, a broad and completely abstract category of people who included not just the alleged opponents of the regime but entire social groups and ethnicities, ‘if they seemed (for equally ill-defined reasons) to threaten the Soviet state’.[80] These ‘enemies’ should be arrested and executed for what they were and not for what they had done.[81] The Soviet propaganda described them as ‘half-animals’ and something ‘lower than two-legged cattle’. Just as Nazi propaganda associated the Jews with images of vermin, parasites, or infectious disease, the Soviet regime referred to those it wished to dstroy as vermin, pollution, and as ‘poisonous weeds needing to be uprooted’.[82] As Stéphane Courtois points out:

In Communism there exists a socio-political eugenics, a form of social Darwinism. … As master of the knowledge of the evolution of social species, Lenin decided who should disappear by virtue of having been condemned to the dustbin of history. From the moment that a decision had been made on a ‘scientific’ basis … that the bourgeoisie represented a stage of humanity that had been surpassed, its liquidation as a class and the liquidation of the individuals who actually or supposedly belonged to it could be justified.[83]

A good example of such dehumanisation followed by genocide was the treatment of the kulaks in the Soviet Union. Kulak was a term used to cover both better-off peasants and any peasant who dared to resist forced collectivisation. Those peasants would have their belongings entirely confiscated and be deported to either hard labour camps or, along with their families, be sent into Siberian exile. The destruction of kulaks during the collectivisation campaigns in the former Soviet Union is analogous to the Nazi genocidal politics against ethnic groups deemed to be sub-human and racially inferior.[84] Similar to Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Lenin’s Soviet Union created entire categories of ‘parasites’ to be ultimately destroyed. These enemies were conveniently dehumanised in order to be mercilessly destroyed on a massive scale. In a speech dated August 1918, Lenin stated:

‘The kulaks are the most beastly, the coarsest, the most savage exploiters … These bloodsuckers have waxed rich during the war on the people’s want … These spiders have grown fat at the expense of peasants … These leeches have drunk the blood of toilers … Merciless war against these kulaks! Death to them!’[85]

According to Vladimir Tismaneanu, a Romanian and American political scientist and sociology professor at the University of Maryland,

The persecution and extermination of the Jews was as much a consequence of ideological tenets, held sacred by the Nazi zealots, as the destruction of the ‘kulaks’ during the Stalinist collectivization campaigns. Millions of human lives were destroyed as a result of the conviction that the sorry state of mankind could be corrected if only the ideologically designated ‘vermin’ were eliminated. This ideological drive to purify humanity was rooted in the scientistic cult of technology and the firm belief that History (always capitalized) had endowed the revolutionary elites … with the mission to get rid of the ‘superfluous’ populations …[86]

It was the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany, the first European country to establish concentration camps in the ‘old continent’.[87] As early as October 1923, there were 315 of them spread all over the Soviet Union. From 1929 to 1951 at least one Russian adult male in five had passed through these concentration camps. Over that period no less than 15 million Russian people were brought into forced labour, with more than 1.5 million dying in prison. Six million people were deported on grounds of family ties and indeed ethnic identity.[88] Hitler knew about those Soviet camps and he learned from them in order to create his own concentration camps in Nazi Germany. As Kaminski pointed out:

The leaders of Soviet communism were the inventors and creators of … the establishments called ‘concentration camps’ … [They] also created a specific method of legal reasoning, a network of concepts that implicitly incorporated a gigantic system of concentration camps, which Stalin merely organized technically and developed. Compared with the concentration camps of Trotsky and Lenin, the Stalinist ones represented merely a gigantic form of implementation … And, of course, the Nazis found in the former as well as the latter ready-made models, which they merely had to develop. The German counterparts promptly seized upon these models.[89]

One of the most disturbing characteristics of Marxist regimes is not the amount of victims arrested, tortured and killed, but rather the principle on which such atrocities can be justified. Once power is achieved, the repressive apparatus can be used to hunt people down, to destroy their lives not for what such people have done but because of their social ‘category’. As Johnson puts it, once the idea of personal guilt is abolished, then a government can more easily eliminate entire categories of individuals on grounds of occupation or parentage. There is actually no limit to the extent to which this deadly principle might be applied. Indeed, entire groups can be classified as “enemies” and then condemned to imprisonment or slaughter. There is no real difference between destroying a social class and destroying a race. The modern practice of genocide had been born.[90]

Marx did not reject terrorism if it suited his ideological goals. Despite the history of the French Revolution during its ‘Terror’ stage, Marx gave its method unqualified endorsement. There was, according to Marx, ‘only one means to curtail, simplify and localize the bloody agony of the old society and the bloody birth-pangs of the new, only one means — the revolutionary terror’.[91] Thus he warned the Prussian government, in 1849: ‘We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism.’[92] When Marx heard about the unsuccessful attempt by a radical anarchist to assassinate German Emperor Wilhelm I, in 1878, a fellow communist recorded his outburst of anger and indignation, ‘heaping curses on this terrorist who had failed to carry out his act of terror’.[93] As Paul Johnson points out:

That Marx, once established in power, would have been capable of great violence and cruelty seems certain. But of course he was never in a position to carry out large-scale revolution, violent or otherwise, and his pent-up rage therefore passed into his books, which always have a tone of intransigence and extremism. Many passages give the impression that they have actually been written in a state of fury. In due course Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung practiced, on an enormous scale, the violence which Marx felt in his heart and which his works exude.[94]

Final Considerations

History shows beyond doubt that the class genocide carried out by Marxist regimes has been aided and abetted by a political philosophy that encourages, inadvertently if not explicitly, policies that turned out to be profoundly genocidal. The problem is not so much that Marxism pays no attention to policies that turn out to be inevitably genocidal, but rather that Marxist ideology has prepared the mindset and paved the way for the implementation of government-sanctioned assassination in a massive scale. In the 20th century alone, Marxist regimes and revolutionary movements killed more than 100 million people.

In addition, the notion that Nazism and Communism are polar opposites on the political spectrum hides the fact that they are actually kindred spirits. There is a remarkable convergence of ideas between these two ideologies. Such a convergence was made evident even before the Nazis and the Communists turned into allies during World War II.[95]

Marxism, in both its original and more orthodox guises, inspired both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis to establish their concentration camps in order to exterminate their political opponents or other ‘undesirable’ individuals. Such an ideological drive in both Communism and Nazism is patently genocidal but it is nonetheless a derivative of the Marxist contempt for the rule of law and, above all, for basic human rights and freedoms.[96] In both public and private conversations, Hitler himself was quite willing to concede his great debt to Marxism, claiming even to have ‘learned a great deal from Marxism’. Above all, Hitler wasn’t so wrong when he candidly confessed: ‘Basically, National-Socialism and Marxism are the same’.[97]. This is probably the only instance where I can say that I actually agree with him.

Dr Augusto Zimmermann LLB, LLM, PhD is Professor of Law at Sheridan College in Perth, Western Australia, and Professor of Law (Adjunct) at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. He is also President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association (WALTA), and a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017).

[14] For a comprehensive analysis of the Nazi platform, see Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (New York/NY: Three Rivers Press, 2009) pp 410–13.

[18] Tom Palmer comments: ‘The National Socialist welfare state, which instituted such an embracing system of patronage, dependence, and loyalty among the German population, was financed … by means of stripping the Jews of their wealth (from their money, businesses, and homes down to their dental fillings, children’s toys, and even their hair), confiscating the assets of enemies of the state, and looting the rest of Europe through requisitions and deliberate inflation of the currencies of occupied countries . It was also a pyramid scheme that required an ever-greater base of people paying into it to channel the loot upwards. Like all pyramid schemes, the Third Reich was doomed to fail’. – T G Palmer, ‘Bismarck’s Legacy’, in Palmer, above n.16, p 36.

[29] Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism )New York/NY: Praeger Publishing, 1970), p 10. In fact, as noted Jonah Goldberg: ‘In Germany the aristocracy and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis. But when Hitler demonstrated that he wasn’t going away, these same elites decided it would be wise to put down some insurance money on the upstarts. This may be reprehensible, but these decisions weren’t driven by anything like an ideological alliance between capitalism and Nazism. Corporations in Germany, like their counterparts today, tended to be opportunistic, not ideological … The Nazis rose to power exploiting anti-capitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilist cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism. Moreover, Nazism also emphasized many of the themes of later New Lefts in other places and times: the primacy of race, the rejection of rationalism, an emphasis on the organic and holistic — including environmentalism, health food, and exercise — and, most of all, the need to “transcend” notions of class’. – Goldberg, above n. 14, pp 58–9.

[30] Richard Pipes, Communism: A History of the Intellectual and Political Movement (London/UK: Phoenix Press, London, 2003), p 75.

[47] Rees, above n.33, p 80. Rees then gives the account of Fritz Arlt, an 18-year old student in the 1930s. Influenced by an older brother, Fritz initially flirted with Communism but eventually decided to embrace National Socialism once he felt that the ‘solidarity’ of International Socialism across national boundaries wasn’t possible because of the individual countries effectively pursuing their own national self-interests.

[75] Thus stated the editorial of the Soviet newspaper, in 1918: ‘We reject the old system of morality and ‘humanity’ invented by the bourgeoisie … Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it rests on a new ideal … To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shaklers … Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves from the return of those jackals!’ – Nicolas Werth, ‘A State Against its People: Violence, Repression and Terror in the Soviet Union’ in Stephane Courtois et al, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p 102

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/adolf-hitlers-debt-karl-marx/feed/7Kelp, Flannery’s Latest Brainwavehttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/05/kelp-flannerys-latest-brainwave/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/05/kelp-flannerys-latest-brainwave/#commentsTue, 08 May 2018 01:26:00 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84273Apparently, if humanity would only listen, the planet could be saved from the ravages of global warming if we were to cultivate seaweed and then consign it to the ocean depths. It's the latest grand scheme from the man who promoted 'hot rocks' salvation

]]>Two indefatigable disciples of Jeremiah for the price of a few cheers is a bargain in any language, but especially when the dialect of choice is climate babble.So it was at the earthy 2018 WOMADelaide’s carbon-neutral Planet Talks, where one of those warmist specimens, a resurgent Tim Flannery, revealed his latest eco-bright idea: salvation by seaweed.

Climate babble, n., 1. Silly or sincere speech about the climate and its effects, esp. the use of words or phrases designed to alarm, give an impression of authenticity, knowledge, precision, etc., such as: becoming obvious, not inconsistent with, in all likelihood, almost inevitable, not a moment to lose, carbon-negative technology, gut feeling, robust, runaway, tipping point, etc. 2. Climate-babbler: a person skilled in the art of climate babble. Syn., driveller, haruspex,snake oil salesperson. E.g.: “A decade ago climate experts were deeply worried; now they are terrified, tearful, traumatised and shaking in their sneakers.”

ABC Science Show’s legendary presenter, self-described “Methuselah” Robyn Williams was the other carbonphobic, teamed up for a fascinating “live” conversation with 60-year-old Flannery; mammalogist, palaeontologist, activist, explorer, discoverer of the greater monkey-faced bat, Pteralopex flanneryi, and author. His latest tome is Sunlight and Seaweed and it was assiduously promoted in their chat, all 51 minutes of which can be heard here.

Williams and Flannery go back a long way. The latter was a director of the South Australian Museum for seven years, from 1999. Williams, now a bequest ambassador for the Australian Museum Trust, was its president for eight years from 1986 and retains the title President Emeritus. It must be very nice to have friends with a taxpayer-funded national broadcaster at their disposal when you are trying to flog a book that presents seaweed as the salvation of mankind.

Be that as it may, Williams spent time at the beginning explaining as best he could how it was a person whose first degree was in literature and the arts became a naturalist, then morphed from director of a state museum into a national-treasure climate change guru.

Flannery: I am truly pleased to be in South Australia because this state is not only leading Australia but also the world in many ways as we address climate change. (Applause.) From the outside, the state looks as if it has been going at light-speed towards a future we all want to get to. Today, on many occasions wind is producing fifty per cent of your electricity and is a major export. (2.30min.) You have also in the last few months put in the world’s largest grid-connected lithium battery – amazing to see that happen – so once again congratulations. I want to take my hat off to you guys. You are showing the rest of the world how to do it. If the rest of the world was doing what you’re doing, we would have the biggest part of the climate problem a very long way to being solved. (Applause).

This will be news to many, including science writer, false-fact finder and domestic energy grid critic, Joanne Nova. On 25January this year the South Australian government demolished the Playford B Plant smoke stack, one its cheapest base-load electricity generators, in an “ideological anti-coal quest.”

Nova: For about $8 million a year over three years, they could have kept some coal power going and wouldn’t have needed to spend $400 million on emergency diesel generators they don’t want to use, and over $100 million on a battery that can supply 4% of the state for one hour. They also would’ve paid less than $120 million for two days of electricity last week. On the upside, they can feel good and pretend to be “world leaders”. Virtue signalling is expensive, eh? (Nova, 25 January, 2018, here)

The bizarre episode eerily resembled a twenty-first century cargo cult: build more spinning towers (or whatever) to honour the gods of renewable energy, blow up or close what Flannery and Williams described as “unfashionable” or “dinosaur” industries, and Great Flying Pig energy will flow to an appliance near you. All it will cost to fund the biggest boondoggle in history is faith in Gaia’s high priests — and a hundred billion dollars a year (the cargo) paid into the Green Climate Fund for a very long time

Patrols of the Australian Government venturing into the “uncontrolled” central highlands of New Guinea in 1946 found the primitive people there swept up in a wave of religious excitement. Prophecy was being fulfilled: The arrival of the Whites [RE] was the sign that the end of the world was at hand. The natives proceeded to butcher all of their pigs-animals that were not only a principal source of subsistence but also symbols of social status and ritual pre-eminence in their culture. They killed these valued animals in expression of the belief that after three days of darkness “Great Pigs” would appear from the sky. (Scientific American, May, 1959)

With regard to the looming atmospheric anarchy, Flannery was on the same page as UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa. At the roll-out of a new report on April 30, she said it was “the single biggest threat to life, security and prosperity on Earth”, and presumably to the global bureaucracy whose credibility – and funding – depends on maintaining the fear, if not rage. But would a mere “gender action plan” increase female participation “in responding to global warming”? One hopes so. Poor Gaia would welcome a dramatic decline in anthropogenic population growth.

The world, however, was way behind South Australia in the self-immolation game. So it really must pull its collective finger out now.

Flannery: Just how far we are behind is shown by the raw figures that dictate the extent of climate change. On 4 March 2018, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 410 parts per million. It is rising at an unprecedented rate. And the rate of warming being driven by it is rising at about one hundred times faster than at any other period in geological history. So we are facing very severe problems in coming decades unless we pull out all stops…We are entering what I would call the acute stage of the climate problem. But we haven’t seen mass systemic change yet on the scale almost certainly to come…Maybe we can start improving things by the 2040s, but only if we pull our finger out now. We’ve just missed the chance to get in early and solve the problem. So we not only must cut emissions from all human sources as fast as we can, but we also have to develop carbon-negative technology that will remove [carbon dioxide] gas from the air to minimize future impacts from runaway climate change.”

Carbon capitalists please note: there are some big opportunities still to be grasped. One of the largest is a “carbon-negative technology” that South Australia is, according to Flannery, uniquely positioned to take up: seaweed. (11.50min.). Help is at hand, in the form of kelp sequestered in the deep ocean.

Flannery: If we can grow seaweed in areas where we can get some of the crop into the deep ocean, we’re on a winner. We can sequester lots and lots of carbon dioxide. South Australia has the cold nutrient-rich water and a marine topography uniquely suited to sequestration. Most of the seaweed in the deep oceans seems to get there through submarine canyons. One of the largest and deepest is right here off Kangaroo Island; four kilometers deep and a superhighway for taking kelp down there and out of the system, along with all the carbon that’s in it. What you need now is investment. You people and your vote has never been more important. (13.0min.)

On one subject, however, there was deafening silence: geothermal energy, hot rocks and the ill-fated Geodynamics saga. Yet a decade ago it occupied the place of kelp today in Flannery’s and, indeed, the national Labor government’s enthusiasms. It all seemed as easy as baking apple pie.

An extract from an ABC PM interview with him on 9 February 2007 (here):

ABC: Geothermal energy is still in it’s infancy in Australia, with experimental sites in South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, but none as yet connected to Australia’s electricity grid.

One of the industry’s greatest proponents is Australian of the Year, Dr Tim Flannery, who told ABC’s Lateline program that the electricity source is one of Australia’s most reliable options for reducing carbon [dioxide] emissions.

Flannery: There are hot rocks in South Australia that potentially have enough embedded energy in them to run the Australian economy for the best part of a century.
Now, they’re not being fully exploited yet but the technology to extract that energy and turn it into electricity is relatively straightforward.

And the rest is history. The ASX-listed geothermal company changed its name in late 2016 to ReNu Energy. It would focus instead on solar PV, battery storage and hybrid energy, leaving the Cooper Basin to the roos and dingbats. But Flannery is still Flannery. (here)

As for question time, if there were climate deniers in the WOMADelaide audience they kept quiet, presumably to avoid becoming victims of a lynch mob. Williams, however, asked a valid one, given comments like this in cyberspace:

My wife and I have decided that every inch of rain that we measure in the rain gauge will now be called a Flannery, in honour of the great scientist and former Australian of the Year. It’s catching on. The whole neighbourhood is now using it. We had 87mm last week, almost three Flanneries. There is now a sign at the local shop and the owner calls them Flanneries too. We are determined never to forget him. (John, listener, Talking Lifestyle radio, 1 March, 2012)

Here is the exchange:

Williams: Do you get put off by being attacked for the hundredth time in the papers?

Flannery: God, I’ve got the skin of a rhinoceros by now. It’s like a game of rugby, right? We’ve got possession of the ball. We’re running for the try line. We’ve made some steps forward. Every bugger on the other side is going to be using every tactic – legal and illegal – to trip you up before you get there. So we’ve just got to keep pushing. Don’t worry about them. Just watch the ball and the game. (Applause). (28min.)

Williams: Why do you think it’s coming from certain forces? Can you guess?

Flannery: Look, old men don’t like losing power. (Applause.) I’m an old man myself. But what it comes down to, Robyn, is that people don’t like change. If you’ve done very well under the old system you like change even less. There’s a lot of ego there as well. People who have built fossil fuel industries, their ego [and shareholder money] is tied up in that old world.

Question (audience): Is it a last ditch effort for these fossil fuel type projects?

Flannery: My gut feeling is it’s a last ditch effort. If we look at oil and gas exploration in the Gulf and Bight, my guess is there would be a number of years of exploration there. The old dinosaur industries are making a bet that their oil and gas will be worth extracting a decade on. My gut feeling is that’s wrong. We’re in a state of great transition. The dinosaur’s been shot in the head, but its tail is still moving.”

Question (audience): When you talk about the impact at the top, the power grab that we see going on from the political characters such as Trump, Putin, and people behind the big fossil fuel and chemical companies; and you talk about character traits such as narcissism, ego, power-grabbing, it suggests to me a predatory nature – a parallel with the recent phenomenon of #MeToo. In the same way I think there’s a hug need to expose these people, even though they may say they are elected and so on. I think there’s a level of exposure that needs to happen. So do you think we need a social media grab that goes out to say this is no longer acceptable? It is a persistent violation. When will it stop? (Applause.) (47min.)

Flannery: I’ve been waiting for it! #MeToo looked so powerful. But it’s just one form of predation on the rest of society. Unless we act to protect our own interests, they will remain in power. We need to act in concert in a way that goes beyond voting – the representational system is broken – to something else. So I agree with you.

The South Australian election was held a week after the talk, on March 17, 2018. The result was clear in a few hours (here). Kelp dreaming, storage batteries, RE evangelism and #MeToo mania were unable to save the day.

Sixteen years of Labor government ended, Steven Marshall became the Liberal Premier and Nick Xenophon left the political stage. Gaia giveth, but Gaia can taketh away too.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/05/kelp-flannerys-latest-brainwave/feed/5Failed Stateshttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/failed-states/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/failed-states/#commentsMon, 07 May 2018 02:04:33 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84250If there is something to be said for the quality and competence of the representatives we send to Canberra it is that those who remain behind to infest state legislatures are even worse. They weren't saints, but how badly we miss the likes of Bolte, Playford, Wran, Kennett, even Joh

]]>While a pretty watertight case can be made that Australians are currently ill-served in relation to the quality of Canberra’s political class, what of the governance of our states? If you think that the likes of Turnbull, Frydenberg, Bishop, Pyne, Shorten et al are short on class, skill, backbone, smarts and morals, what to make of the mire of talentless spivs who run the lower jurisdictions? In fact, an interesting exercise might be to come up with a suitable collective noun for a group of state politicians. An ICAC of state politicians, perhaps.

The stand-out leaders at state level in Australia are, historically, slender in number, to put it kindly. There were a a few in the 1950s and 1960s – Thomas Playford, Charles Court and Henry Bolte come to mind – and in later decades a smattering of giants like Jo Bjelke-Petersen, Neville Wran (the master politician) and (of course) Jeff Kennett. In recent times, only Campbell Newman catches the eye, and he was cut down before he hit his stride.

In the great state of New South Wales, on the Liberal side there have been (seemingly) at least thirty or forty “leaders” these past decades, some of whose names (Debnam) can scarcely be remembered. Of these only two stand out. One, Bob Askin, is remembered largely for three things – changing his name from Robin to Robert, his infamous urging of police to “run the bastards over” — the “them” being anti-Vietnam protesters doing very much the right thing during a visit of the ghastly LBJ — and, finally, his proclivity (alleged, assumed and still occasionally denied) for brown paper bags and hanging with corrupt senior coppers.

The other noteworthy, Nick Greiner, had and has his admirers, though he was substantially overrated and threw away government, inflicting on us through his ineptitude that amiable bungler John Fahey, surely the leader of the worst government at any level in the country’s history – a government held to ransom by Tony Windsor et al. Ultimately and even worse in terms of character, the truly egregious Bob Carr. Anyone disputing my claim about Fahey’s people only need recall Terry (Inspector Gadget) Griffiths, Tony Packard, Neil “I’m off to London” Pickard and all the other bunglers. Michael Photios I will come to later. And Tony Windsor was, back then in his Macquarie Street days, only just warming up in terms of the endless whinging and blackmailing of governments to bestow useless goodies on the bush. He would perfect that art with the help of Julia Gillard after his move to Canberra.

Then we had Bob “I will practise my German during question time” Carr for a tedious, dreary decade in which NSW went deep green, Treasury was infested with mediocrities and the oddly charming Michael Egan – who kept on smoking in smoke-free government offices for the duration – in effect drove NSW infrastructure into the ground.

To the south, we now have an absolute lunatic “running” Victoria, a state which may indeed deserve Daniel Andrews in view of the residents’ high threshold for tolerating the scarily incompetent. As for the leaders of the other mainland eastern states, the average punter would be unable to spell their names and, even less, to list a single achievement of either. Recently ousted South Australiam premier Jay Weatherill’s success at thoroughly stuffing his state’s industrial base, blowing up power stations, hiking electricity prices, periodically plunging Adelaide into darkness and being eagerly seduced by Elon Musk’s battery-powered snake oil do not count as achievements.

Even this cursory flick through recent history serves as a reminder of the dearth of state talent in Australia. Why are state governments so bad? And why is NSW perhaps the worst of all?* After all, we can endlessly produce Test cricketers (even though some of them cheat a bit). We also produce the odd great prime minister. From the Rum Corps onwards, all the way down to Gladys, NSW has been governed by chancers of dubious political merit, many content to forsake Canberra for minding the political shop in Macquarie Street. (*editor: If you think NSW is bad just try living in Victoria, where the recent budget unashamedly announces the government’s intentiond to find more Victorians guilty of more things in order to boost on-the-spot fine revenues.)

State governments don’t have that much to do, and certainly not much of consequence. But they generally get wrong the very little they do have to do. They mercilessly bully local councils – many of which, mind you, richly deserve all the bullying they get. They rip off people and businesses through taxes that should by now have been abolished. They endlessly hold their hands out for more Canberra money. They whine about others whom they allege are the cause of all their problems. They bicker in unseemly fashion with their peers. They don’t build the infrastructure we need while building the infrastructure we don’t. They strut about it in gay parades and love a good smoking ceremony if that signals their virtue to mates and fellow members of the political class.

NSW has had something like seven premiers in a dozen or so years, and each somehow seems worse than his or her predecessor. Carr did nothing – nothing – to advance the state. He simply occupied the building and strutted a lot. Barry O’Farrell quit the top job over a bottle of wine. Morris Iemma – who? Nathan Rees – nice guy, studied English lit, tried his hardest, but nothing achieved. Kristina Keneally set male journalists’ hearts aflutter and spouted very average feminist theology but achieved nought other than re-promoting Macca and Eddie, now both keeping her Majesty company. Mike Baird saved the poor greyhounds, then promptly unsaved them, after which episode he fled the scene faster than the Dapto dogs’ mechanical hare to spend more time with his bank buddies. And dear old Gladys, the latest Photios candidate, is a lefty (naturally) who has dug up the CBD to the detriment of traders, shoppers, motorists and pedestrians so that light rail, that particular and peculiar fetish of the Left, can run a few trams down a George Street that has been half destroyed in the process. Meanwhile, apart from lip service, real and pressing transport problems go unaddressed.

Why the persistently poor governance, then, of our states — the very jurisdictions intended to make federalism work its magic?

Well, we certainly send good ones off to Canberra (Howard, Abbott). But then we also send bad ones off to Canberra (Turnbull). National politics are where the decisions of consequence are made and debates of consequence held. The states not so much. Making decisions about planning, trains, buses and so on has limited appeal for the high fliers, even for the low fliers “supported by occasional gusts of wind”, to quote Sir Humphrey. State politics get the B Teams.

What else? For some reason, the alignment of lucrative development investments and political interest seems to bring out the worst in the people involved. There is a reason why ICACs are created at state level. They are most needed there.

There is also a reason why economic theorists came up with “public choice theory” – to describe the private interests of public officials and explain how these motivate political and bureaucratic behaviour. This is the seedy side of life and politics. For example: the amenity of whole cities being destroyed in the name of a lefty notion called urban consolidation, inevitably to the massive benefit of corporate developers and enabled by politicians in the political debt of their own sideline organisers. Those lobbyists know where all the bodies are buried and how to game the system to their own and their corporate clients’ benefit. Everyone’s a winner, except the public. And voting in the other mob is not really an answer, since they will have their own mates, minders, enablers, plus those on the make and the take, all all clipping the taxpayers’ ticket. Not a pretty picture, neither the urban blight delivered nor the sleaziness of the process.

Perhaps the creepy workings of the factions of state politics best sum up the quagmire. On either side of politics in the great state of NSW, for example, we have the unedifying choice of the Dastyari mob from Sussex Street or the oiliness of Liberal fixers who stack party branches with “moderate” mates, lobby ministers they factionally control, line their own pockets in a way that has all the hallmarks of insider trading (despite minimalist rules about these things), all the while holding the uninformed public to ransom.

Yes, NSW is a borderline failed state. But it ain’t alone. South Australia, basically a country town on the edge of a desert, can’t keep its lights on. Victoria is run by a cabal who demonstrate that combination of being simultaneously talentless and dangerous. It takes a special skill to spend a billion dollars on not building a much-needed road while constructing a desal plant because a paleontologist tirelessly promoted by the ABC as a climate guru reckons it’s just the shot to fill dams “that will never fill again.” Actually, that’s not quite true. Being a Labor project, the feather-bedded union workers who threw up the desal plant made out like bandits, which they were.

Or take Queensland. Annastacia’s husband is an adviser to a coal company, so she withdrew support for the jobs-creating Adani mine. Hubby has an income; little people can go hang while Greens clap and cheer. This is anti-development strategy incarnate. Tom Playford would spin in his grave. These people are an embarrassment to the political class, and a disgrace to the practice of noble politics envisioned by Edmund Burke, A V Dicey and fellow theorists.

When it comes to sleaziness, come to think of it, maybe the “greats” of old weren’t that great themselves. Joh? Bolte? Askin? Playford? Wran? Of dubious honesty, or so it is said, but they were competent, give them that — extremely effective at staying in power, at building systems that maintained their political domination and kept functioning the circles of favour that benefited the in-crowd. All true, but they did get useful things done.

Failed states? At least, I suppose, we should be grateful that, unlike the USA, we have only six of them.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/failed-states/feed/2ABC to Complainant: Drop Deadhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-complainant-drop-dead/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-complainant-drop-dead/#commentsSat, 05 May 2018 04:07:27 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84196Once, when the ABC was a proper news organisation, Geoffrey Luck ran the broadcaster's London bureau. When he saw a recent report that hailed Britain's conservatives for rejecting coal while neglecting to mention the hefty contribution of nuclear and gas, he dashed off a letter....

]]>On April 11 in Canberra, three of the most senior ABC executives — a trio representing combined salaries far in excess of a million dollars a year — appeared before Senate Estimates. The entire transcript of that session can be found here and will confirm the impression of many that the national broadcaster is a law unto itself, an entity whose managing director is alternately very sharp on the uptake and, whenever it seems to suit, thick as a post. Readers are encouraged in particular to note the distance from candour between Senator Abetz’s repeated attempts to ascertain why the ABC is spending public money to promote the hijab and editor-in-chief Michelle Guthrie’s blandly vacant answers (page 3) that the latest taxpayer-funded vehicle to advance the media career of Yasmin Abdel-Magied is just “part of a fashion program.”

Shortly after that exercise in query and fog, the following exchange concerning the ABC’s handling of public complaints unfolds between Senator Eric Abetz and ABC editorial director Alan Sunderland ($178,145 p.a., as of 2013). Read it as a background briefing before absorbing the dismissive arrogance on display in the exchange of correspondence between Quadrant contributor and former ABC London bureau chief Geoffrey Luck and Audience and Consumer Affairs investigations chief Denise Musto. Their exchange is reproduced in full below this Estimates transcript. The emphasis is Quadrant Online‘s.

ABETZ: Can you indicate to us, on notice, the criteria to determine how a complaint is dealt with and how it is determined whether a complaint should be reviewed by the ACA [Audience and Consumer Affairs] team or by the program itself?

Mr Sunderland: Sure, I will provide you a summary.

ABETZ: Thank you. I note that in the October-December 2017 quarter only seven per cent of complaints received were actually investigated. Is that correct?

Sunderland: I’m not familiar with that particular statistic and how it’s derived. I’d need to check on that and get back to you. It depends on whether you are talking about that as a percentage of all complaints or as a percentage of editorial complaints.

ABETZ: Of 4,954 complaints received, 374 were investigated. They are the raw figures, and if you could take that on notice I would be much obliged. Could you also advise why so few complaints were investigated? I note that of the 374 complaints investigated, four per cent — only 14 — were actually upheld. So I put to you the proposition: Is it really the case that 96 per cent of complaints during that time period were unfounded? So if you could provide us with an analysis I would be much obliged. Can I also ask: Do you think it’s reasonable that so many Australians take the time to provide feedback, only to have their complaints either ignored — 1,686 complaints were not responded to in the October 2017 quarter — or dismissed, with 4,940 complaints not being upheld? So I would invite you to have a look at that on notice.

Sunderland: I will look at that on notice. I think it is important to make one point, which is that it would be a mistake to assume that a complaint that is not investigated by Audience and Consumer Affairs is ignored or dismissed. A complaint may well be investigated and there may even be errors identified and responded to without it needing to be handled through an investigation.

All clear on that, especially in regard to Sunderland’s assurance that “it would be a mistake to assume that a complaint that is not investigated by Audience and Consumer Affairs is ignored or dismissed”? Good.

Now read on to see how a recent complaint was not merely “ignored and dismissed” but outright rejected on the grounds that Ms Musto did not like Geoffrey’s “tone and language”. As a consequence, she assures him, future such queries will be ignored entirely! Perhaps, had Geoffrey peppered his missive with f***s and c***s, which the ABC deems perfectly okay for beaming into Australian livingrooms, Ms Musto might have felt more comfortable.

As Tony Abbott and other prominent Coalition MPs make the case that Australia should be building new coal-fired power stations, Conservatives in Britain are pushing a very different agenda.

Here is Geoffrey’s letter, filed via the ABC’s online form. Readers afflicted with Ms Musto’s exquisite sensitivities might choose to stop reading right here or, in the interest of personal safety, to make sure an accommodating sofa is at hand as they clutch their pearls and swoon.

Subject:Cannane on coalComments: Never in the history of the ABC’s London office has such a despicable piece of propaganda posting as journalism been put to air as Steve Cannane’s “report” on the future of coal in the UK.Nearly fifty years ago, as London Editor, I led a team of Robin Sharpe, Richard Palfreyman and Paul Lynham. Despite opposition to voice reporting by the General Manager, and lack of support from C. News, we broke many stories, including the first TV interview of a British Prime Minister and day-to-day reporting of the beginnings of the Northern Ireland Troubles. In this, Palfreyman was held up at gunpoint by the IRA in Belfast and robbed. Lynham and I were both threatened on the streets of Londonderry.By contrast, a supine Cannane trots off to Selby and mouths a pitifully distorted tale of the demise of the UK coal industry and thermal coal generation. This was politically positioned to dramatise the difference between British “enlightenment” and the Australians who want coal recognised. Australia has hundreds of years of coal deposits; Britain’s pits are almost exhausted, and coal generation is much dearer than gas.

What Cannane duplicitiously avoided reporting was that Britain gets 18% of its electricity from nuclear generation, and 39% from North Sea gas. Australia refuses to even debate nuclear power, and gas is restricted by political bans on exploration and/or extraction. The biomass (wood pellets) he featured at the Drax plant at Selby contribute an insignificant proportion of Britain’s energy, but a disproportionate amount of “feel-good” prattle about carbon (misleading Green shorthand for harmless carbon dioxide) emissions.The latest Ofgen report – with which Cannane should be familiar – explains that the increase in renewables contribution to generation to 30% had been largely due to unusually windy weather.There was no news in the 39% reduction in coal-fired generation since 2012, to the present 9% (not 7%). The fact is that Britain has been saved for the last fifty years or so by the discovery of North Sea gas (in my time) and the forward-looking policy of developing nuclear energy. Together they have supplied 60% of the UK’s power all that time. The British policy of fostering renewables is not new and is well known. What Cannane could have usefully done is examine the economics of that policy. Obviously that was beyond him, and beyond the political objectives of the organization he slavishly serves.RecipientName – Audience & Consumer Affairs

Geoffrey’s critical observations have definite merit, and his experience as the former head of the same London bureau from which reporter Canane now sallies forth confer a special relevance to a veteran journalist’s critique that no mention was made of coal’s demise being enabled by the preponderance of nuclear- and gas-generated energy.

Here is Ms Musto’s response. She doesn’t like his tone. Arrogant, what?

Dear Mr LuckI refer to your email of 9 April.In keeping with the ABC’s complaint handling procedures, your correspondence has been considered by Audience and Consumer Affairs, a unit separate to and independent of the content making areas of the ABC. Our role is to review and, where appropriate, investigate complaints alleging that ABC content has breached the ABC’s editorial standards, which can be found here: http://about.abc.net.au/reports-publications/code-of-practice/As you may be aware, the ABC Code of Practice explains that the ABC may decide not to investigate a complaint which is “not made in good faith”, and it is on this basis that we decline to investigate this complaint. Should you wish to reconsider the tone and language used in this email, and resubmit your complaint accordingly, we would be happy to review your concerns. Notwithstanding this, please be assured that your comments are duly noted.In future, complaints you submit which include insults towards individual members of ABC staff or the ABC more broadly will be noted, but will not be responded to. Yours sincerely

Denise MustoInvestigations ManagerAudience and Consumer Affairs

One day we might see a minister in charge who enjoys the backing of his prime minister and has the gumption to respond in kind to such insults and abuse of privilege. This would make a radical change from the current standard, which recently saw Communications Minister Mitch Fifield complain about foul language on a purported comedy program. Like Geoffrey Luck, he was told his gripe just wasn’t worth taking seriously.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/media-2/2018/05/abc-complainant-drop-dead/feed/13Why, Twenty-One Times Why?https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/twenty-one-times/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/twenty-one-times/#commentsThu, 03 May 2018 01:39:27 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84103Is there no limit to the demands of political correctness, the burden of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems, and the detachment from empirical reality that can be imposed on a society? Here, a list of questions whose answers would be obvious were they not being obscured

]]>Although the basic principles of logic are fundamental to the form of symbolic communication and reasoning we know as language, these are all too readily ignored where personal gain or emotional satisfaction are involved. Such disregard for truth not only varies between individuals, but also between cultures and within cultures over time. Currently Western Culture seems to be in a period of decline in this regard with the rise of post-modern political correctness playing a major role and with social media aiding and abetting the malaise through easy propagation and ready access to social affirmation for almost anything one might choose to believe.

Every day the news media spew an irrational swill of dubious opinion parading as fact. Even when directly conflicted by sound readily available evidence, it is simply ignored. Remarkably, and no matter how ill-founded it may be, much of this effluvium is swallowed by a large audience already primed for unquestioning acceptance.

That we should prefer to believe what we find satisfying and seek comfort and support in others of similar belief is understandable. What is difficult to comprehend, however, is our willingness to lie to ourselves with irrational conviction simply because we find the indications of reason and evidence discomforting in some way. This is especially remarkable in view of the repeated and disastrous consequences of beliefs clearly not in accord with the actual world in which we exist and/or contrary to the observable nature of our own being.

The following is an arbitrary selection of a score of examples from recent news. They range in import from the trivial to the critical, but all beg for an answer as to why:

Why do we facilitate the largescale ongoing immigration of refugees from failed states with no assessment of the outcomes? In particular, it would seem worth trying to better understand the effect of a common factor for almost all of the failed states, which is the nature of the culture they share and how this may be affecting the successful assimilation of these immigrants.

Why is there such a political obsession in Australia with climate change and carbon emissions when no recent extremes of climate are outside the bounds of earlier natural variability, when the claimed warming trend is less than the margin of error in measurement and when this is the only developed economy in which the level of natural uptake exceeds the emissions. As Australia is a net carbon sink, why are we not then receiving credits from other nations who are large net emitters?

Why is there a massive drive for wind and solar power when they require three to four times more installed generating capacity than they deliver and, at current levels, are providing only about 10% of baseload demand at already exorbitant cost with increasingly difficult load management problems? Especially, when the full baseload capacity of conventional power is still required to provide backup for the highly erratic alternative power and it must then be running inefficiently in standby mode much of the time.

Why are we seeking to re-equip the RAN with a handful of extravagantly expensive and vulnerable frigates and submarines which have a very limited capacity to defend the nation when, for far less cost, we could have hundreds of versatile long-range drone ships and aircraft which would provide a truly formidable defence capability?

Why does it require 100 hours driving time to get a provisional drivers licence in Queensland but less than half that time to get a private pilot’s licence, especially when our road accident and fatality rates indicate no benefit over jurisdictions with far less onerous requirements? (see Figure 3.1 to see how the state’s road toll had already decreased to a fraction of its 1970 high when the new measures were introduced)

Why is it that with the largest per capita fishing zone in the world we must import between 66% and 75% of the seafood we eat and thus add to the pressure on marine resources with orders of magnitude greater demand on them?

Why do GBRMPA, academics and environmentalists repeatedly and blatantly exaggerate the economic value for GBR tourism by claiming the gross value for tourism in the region when only half of visitors visit the reef at all and for almost all of those who do their reef experience is a single day trip which is an activity that comprises only a few percent of the gross value of tourism? Why, too, is this never challenged, as it surely would be if any other tourism sector claimed credit for the entire value for tourism?

Why do we repeatedly see Aboriginal culture described as being 50,000 years old and “the oldest on Earth” when, all cultures are the same age but some have changed more than others, nothing is known about the culture 50,000 years ago and even the most recent pre-European culture is no longer practiced? Wouldn’t it be a lot more honest to just say that Aboriginal culture is rich and unique with ancient roots. By emphasising the age are we not in effect implying something primitive and backward.

Why do we use the term “Aboriginal civilisation” when the culture was that of hunter-gathering with none of the key characteristics by which the term “civilization” is defined? These include such things as agriculture, social stratification, buildings, civil works, urbanisation, specialisations of labour and some form of symbolic record keeping.

Why the phobia about nuclear power when we have the largest reserves in the world, ideal conditions for it and, with current technology, can enjoy the cheapest, most reliable, safest and cleanest power of all? Better still, we also have vast areas of the most remote, geologically stable and driest places to store any waste.

Why do we ban the clearing of native vegetation and increasingly hamstring our farmers and graziers with myriad environmental costs, restrictions and demands? We used to have an abundance of some of the least expensive high-quality food in the world. Now we have some of the most expensive with increasing dependence on imports.

Why is it that Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea et al. are always having to impose gross violations of human rights and subject their populations to severe deprivations for some higher purpose which remains permanently in the future? Might there not in fact be some fundamental fallacy in collectivist philosophy that renders freedom, prosperity and equality permanently unattainable?

Why do eyeglasses and dental implants, bridges and caps cost vastly more in Australia than they do in the now-advanced economies in Asia, where training, equipment and overhead costs are otherwise similar? Is there some government-enabled monopoly that permits this?

Why all the celebration of having the most expensive housing in the world when houses are simply a cost of living that is turning Australia into a land of indentured servants owned by the banks? Is it not like celebrating increases in food prices because they make the food in our pantry more valuable?

Why is it that the prevailing demographic of the Green vote is inner-urban non-producers whose own chosen habitat where nature has been virtually annihilated, is the fraction of 1% of the continent?

Why is it that so many of those who profess such great concern over threats to the environment greet any evidence that something may not be as bad as they fear with anger and rejection, never with hopeful interest? Might it be that their real commitment is not to nature but, to displaying their virtue and pleasuring themselves with a delicious sense of self-righteousness?

In short, is there no limit to the demands of political correctness, the burden of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems and the detachment from empirical reality that can be imposed on a society?

That, at least, would seem to be one question for which we seem well on the way to a decisive answer.

A marine biologist, Walter Starck has spent much of his career studying coral reef and marine fishery ecosystems

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/twenty-one-times/feed/6Paid to Star not to Marhttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/paid-star-mar/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/paid-star-mar/#commentsWed, 02 May 2018 23:02:06 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84096In a market economy, top-end salaries are set by competitive forces, so we shouldn't get into a funk about CEOs taking home millions. What should concern us, both as shareholders and citizens, is the acumen of those so garlanded with gold

]]>Some commentators on the doings of the banking royal commission figuratively raise their eyebrows at the salaries paid to senior bankers. “A nice earner if you can get it.” Me, I don’t get fussed about some businesses willingly and legally paying certain employees large sums of money. That’s their call. On the other hand, it is galling when those receiving such sums prove to be negligent or, worse, shady; particularly when they cause collateral damage to ‘innocent civilians’. That’s the real crime.

The salaries of all those in the upper echelons of corporate life are nowadays far above what they were in earlier times. Rounded, the latest figure which I have found show CEOs of top companies earn around 300 times a worker’s average salary in the US, 130 times in the UK and 80 times in Australia. If we were to go back fifty years the gaps were far smaller; for example, about 20 times in the US. A similar story of rising disparity applies in the UK, in Australia and elsewhere in the developed world. What to make of it?

I was once chief economist for the largest state-based bank in the 1980s. The bank had been in existence since the late 19th century. As with all Australian state and regional banks at the time, it specialised in accepting retail deposits and lending for housing. This was by far the most of its business. It was a profitable and safe business which required no great intellectual or entrepreneurial firepower to run it.

The new CEO and those he brought in (which included me as a peripheral actor) had a brief to expand the bank’s operations into corporate lending. It was rumoured that sizeable salaries had been paid to attract the requisite corporate talent. What a disaster it all turned out to be.

The bank went down in 1991. Australian banks suffered badly during the 1990/91 recession. Arguably, others would have gone down but for the support of the Reserve Bank. Most held poor quality assets, put on their books by highly paid bankers. The defining catastrophe for the bank that I worked for was its ruinous ownership of a merchant bank subsidiary; run by a highly-paid Young Businessman of the Year (1986) who “made reckless [lending] decisions on inadequate information.” (Woodward Royal Commission)

Why am I telling this tale of woe? It is to point out that the price of failure can be very high in the business world. Undoubtedly, in retrospect, in view of the bank collapsing, the salaries of those brought in to take the bank to new horizons were, to put it mildly, excessive. But this has to be also looked at from a different angle. Exactly how much would someone be worth who could have prevented the bank’s failure and turned the situation around? “A lot” is the answer.

Boards and shareholders face a stark choice. Take the CBA (which I have chosen only for illustrative purposes). Its market capitalisation is about $126 billion and, at last count, its net profit was near to $10 billion or 8% of its market capitalisation. The board knows, from experience of the corporate world, that a new CEO could potentially take profitability up to 9% or down to 7%. That is a swing of $2.5 billion. Now how much is the right person worth? My illustration is not in the least stretched.

Businesses of all kinds risk putting people in senior positions whose decision-making might turn out to be seriously wayward. I have singled out banking because I have first-hand experience. But take mining. I owned shares in BHP when it bought shale oil assets in the US and lost billions and when a tailings dam in Brazil, for which it had shared responsibility, burst killing nineteen people and covering villages in a deluge of unpleasant mud. As a shareholder (part owner) I ‘deservedly’ lost a considerable amount of money (for me). My dividend at one point was cut from 60 cents to 16 cents per share. I can’t recall the directors or the senior executives correspondingly cutting their salaries by three-quarters. The chairman of the company during this period of my loss was named a Companion of the Order of Australia in June 2017, in part for his leadership in mining. During his tenure the share price of BHP fell from around $38 in March 2010 to a little over $26 in August 2017.

As soon as Wesfarmers bought the Homebase chain in the UK, I sold my shares. I’m a slow learner but a learner. I know the UK and thought that it didn’t match well with the Bunnings model. But some highly-paid executives evidently thought that it did. The result, in early 2018, a write down of over $1 billion.

Better people in charge of BHP and Wesfarmers might have made decisions which would have saved many, many multiples of whatever sized salaries were paid to them. Equally better people in senior positions in banks might have avoided letting financial advisors and planners dud their customers.

Larger businesses are larger than they were decades ago and operate globally much more than they did. Competition is stiffer. There is less room for error. The rewards for success and the penalties for failure are more evident. Getting the right people at the top is defining. Whether they are paid, say, $5 million or $10 million or more is a trivial detail. An English football analogy is apropos.

When I was a lad supporting Liverpool FC, the club’s leading player was my hero Billy Liddell. He was paid £20 a week, about 60% more than the average working wage at the time. Liverpool signed Mohamed Salah from Roma last year for £34 million and gave him a salary of £90,000 per week on a five-year contract. His salary pales against the value he has brought to the club. It is reported that he will be offered a new contract worth £200,000 per week. Is this too much? Supporters on an average wage of a little over £500 a week don’t think so. They don’t want to lose him.

In a market economy, top-end salaries are set by competitive forces. We should not get into a funk about CEOs taking home millions, even tens of millions of dollars. Leave that to nutty left-wing economists and politicians rabbiting on endlessly and mindlessly about inequality. An individual worker at ‘the coal face’ has no measurable influence on the performance of a large business. A CEO and those immediately around him (or her) have a defining influence. We should reserve our ire for those paid a lot who deliver losses and injury.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/paid-star-mar/feed/11Malcolm Turnbull, Plague Bacillushttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/malcolm-turnbull-plague-bacillus/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/malcolm-turnbull-plague-bacillus/#commentsWed, 02 May 2018 06:36:00 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84063The PM and his Black Handers hijacked the Liberal Party, and in this shameful endeavour they have had far too much success. Barely recognisable as the party of Menzies and Howard, its flight from principle can end only in electoral doom

]]>Niki Savva is apparently unaware of how sadly comic her obsessive Turnbull sycophancy and Abbott-hatred have come to look, repeated monotonously in The Australian. One of the more recent effusions by this spouse of a prime ministerial staffer is headed Turnbull is flawed but only he can win for the Libs and breaks new ground in the reversal of fact. She even managed to dredge up that greatest beat-up of all time, Abbott’s “knighting” of Prince Philip, which unlike Turnbull’s energy policies, cost the community nothing. It simply brought Australia into line with other Commonwealth countries. The remainder of her article is long on abuse but short on facts, plus religious statements of faith such as that under Turnbull the next election is “eminently winnable.”

If the Liberals go into the next election under Turnbull, I believe that they will stand not only to lose but to lose on a scale that will make their recent wipe-out in Western Australia look like the proverbial vicarage tea-party. Forget about merely losing government for a term, let alone any chance of retaining it: the Liberals, as the standard-bearers of Australia’s liberal-conservative tradition, under a continuing Turnbull leadership, stand a good chance of disappearing from history, or perhaps, like the British Liberals, dragging out existence as a sort of ghost of a party. A conservative party under a man with no belief in conservatism is simply not viable.

They just might be saved in the short term by the electorate’s quite justified dread of Shorten’s ruinous 19th century socialism and generally dubious connections, but that’s not the way to bet. And remember 1982, when Labor in a last-minute ambush produced Bob Hawke as leader and trounced Fraser?

The closest thing to values that Turnbull has evoked has been the near-meaningless mantra of “Jobs and Growth.” There is no sign that he comprehends there are things of more transcendent importance. He has given no sign of any awareness of warnings like that given by Italian writer Giulio Meotti:

Without the courage to insist on safeguarding our values, and passing our inheritance on to our children, we Europeans will simply disappear — as many groups have before. With us, however, will disappear the most enlightened civilization the world has ever known.

It is conservatives who take values seriously, who see society not as a machine to be re-jigged but as an old growth to be trimmed and tended with care, the traditions, conventions and values of the past to be take seriously (as Chesterton said, “the democracy of the dead”). They will find precious few signs of such attitudes in what the ABC/Fairfax axis calls the “moderate” – ie Turnbullite – wing of the Liberal Party today.

As Whitlam, Fraser and others discovered to their cost, one thing the Australian electorate dislikes is arrogance. Voters are hardly likely to flock to a prime minister who is arrogance personified — and whose arrogance seems, moreover, to be quite without justification.

Turnbull has allowed the Australian government to pay, on an annual basis, $43.8 million to the Palestinian Authority and $17.6 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The PA is not only a vicious, corrupt dictatorship but both are directly connected to anti-Jewish terrorism and murder. About half the PA’s budget goes to paying terrorists and their families. The fact Turnbull and Bishop have made simultaneous warm overtures to Israel bespeaks either ignorant confusion of an attempt to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. This is shocking and indefensible.

The Liberal powerbrokers, if there are any left, cannot depend on conservatives voting for them because, as Mark Textor shamefully and inaccurately opined, they have nowhere else to go. They do. This time there are a number of conservative, patriotic or generally-right-of-centre alternatives. None can be seen as achieving power in its own right but they do not need to. There are none, so far, I agree with completely, and I have deep disagreements with some, but compared to Turnbull’s Black Hand gang, they offer, so far, an awareness of honour and courage. It must take some bravery to be Pauline Hanson.

I write this with no pleasure. My family are rusted-on Liberals. My father and maternal grandfather were Liberal MPs and founding members of the party (my father being briefly Premier of WA). I have twice been a Liberal State candidate and have worked for the party in various capacities since I was teenager. With my children, that makes four generations.

The salient point is that many of the conservatives who make up a large part of the Liberal Party are utterly disgusted by Turnbull’s betrayal of Abbott in particular and betrayal of Liberal principles in general. And they have maintained their rage. The Turnbull regime amounts to nothing less than an attempt to hi-jack the Liberal Party, and in this endeavour it has had far too much success. It has already made it in some places unrecognisable as the party of Menzies and Howard.

Why, apart from the fear of what Shorten would do in government, should any conservative vote for it? Indeed, many a conservative might reason that Australia would at least survive three years of Shorten, but the Liberal Party, and Australia conservatism as a whole, would not survive three more years of Turnbull. Shortly before the last election Turnbull sent me and some other Liberals an emetic e-mail explaining that his father had taught him “loyalty,” proving only that his father was either not a very effective teacher or had a very strange idea of loyalty. How can Turnbull ask for loyalty when he has shown none?

Fiscally, Turnbull offers only Labor-lite high-taxing, high-spending. He is bashing the thrifty middle-class and self-funded retirees, foisting ruinous and, for pensioners etc., perhaps literally lethal energy policies on Australia, despite our huge energy resources, unreliable and costly wind and solar power, plus a scheme, as far as I can make out, involving making the Snowy River flow uphill.

There is an incoherent defence policy under one of the least impressive Defence Ministers ever, with a chief apparently falling in line with the official zeitgeist by solemnly banning skull decorations and Phantom rings for troops, as well as the name “Spartan” – not sissy enough for the jazz-ballet dancing, free verse-reading new model army apparently being aimed for. Meanwhile, notice has been given that ADF officers will be promoted according to their active support for homosexuality, signalled by a little rainbow flag beside their names. A word from the Prime Minister might have restored sanity to the circus of political correctness that is undermining our armed forces (there is no room to go into all the details here), but of course such a word is not forthcoming.

Despite assurances, the Liberal Party under Turnbull did not protect either freedom of speech or freedom of religion in the same-sex marriage bill.

The utterly toxic Section 18C is still in place. True, an attempt to modify it after the death of Bill Leak was defeated in the Senate but a determined Prime Minister could have found other ways to nullify it, or at least could have publicly and generously compensated and apologised to its victims, from Andrew Bolt to the Queensland University of Technology students, with a public denunciation in Parliament of the legislation. That would have knocked the stuffing out of it. Don’t tell me a leader, with all the resources of the Commonwealth Attorney-General at his disposal and a gaggle of party and parliamentary QCs, couldn’t have found a way.

Turnbull’s sins of omission, if anything, outweigh his sins of commission. All over what has been called the Free World there is an attack on free speech, now reaching its apogee in Scotland with a man being heavily fined for filming a dog giving a Nazi salute. In Australia, as elsewhere, a chief executive is needed who is a robust and high-profile defender of free speech. But from Turnbull, nothing.

Mosques dispensing Islamic extremism, even with connections to apologists for terrorism and to overt anti-Semitism, are allowed to flourish. Supporting the white farmers facing genocide in South Africa, or closing down jihad-preaching mosques might show a little gumption and resolve, and even draw some conservative votes.There are many thousands of Vietnamese in Australia (voters) who would appreciate Australia demanding that the Vietnamese police-state dictatorship respect human rights (if that annoys Hanoi’s boss-thugs, so much the better). The moving tributes the Vietmanese-Australians paid “father and saviour” Malcolm Fraser on his death showed their strong sense of gratitude.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for any of this to happen.

Abbott, despite moving too slowly in some areas, and making some blunders — what first-term leader hasn’t? – at least knew that the culture war was to be fought, and even more to the point, whose side he was on.

I know the Arts Council is supposed to be free of political influence but still I have a hard time believing that under Abbott the small grant to Quadrant, Australia’s only conservative literary-intellectual magazine, praised by some of the greatest names in the world in arts and letters, would have been cut off, while left magazines and a festival of Muslim hate-poetry (exposed by Mark Latham in The Spectator) would continue to receive grants totalling six figures from various government and quasi-government patrons. The leader of what sort of party allows his arts minister to heave an impotent shrug and do nothing upon being informed that one artistic recipient of the taxpayers’ largesse made her name by making “art” out of her own excrement?

Michael Connor wrote in Quadrant:

So-called conservative arts ministers place Left operatives in positions of power and encourage them to fund our cultural enemies. Coalition governments reward the people who hate them for the abuse they turn against them. Conservative politicians smile in photographs taken with people who loathe them, but who accept their money, [while] young (and not so young) conservative artists will be locked out for their lifetimes.

There was a real possibility of Abbott reducing this. Turnbull and his cronies offer none, and cultural conservatives know it. Their despair and rage may sometimes be motivated by self-interest, but by no means always.

Nothing has been done to clean up the extreme political bias of the gigantic, $1.1-billion ABC, in clear breach of its charter, and without a single conservative figure. Moreover, it is obvious that under the present regime nothing will be done — unless, of course, its grant money is actually increased.

Overarching all, there is the great, existential clash of cultures and civilizations. Again, apart from the commitment of a few troops at America’s behest, our Prime Minister gives no sign that he is even aware of it.

We can expect all this to be remembered by a substantial number of voters when the government, with its one-seat majority, achieved by Turnbull’s less-than-brilliant tactics, faces them at the next election.

]]>https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/malcolm-turnbull-plague-bacillus/feed/14Guaranteeing a Generation of Doltshttps://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/gonski-guaranteeing-generation-dolts/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/gonski-guaranteeing-generation-dolts/#commentsWed, 02 May 2018 01:24:07 +0000Roger Franklinhttp://quadrant.org.au/?post_type=opinion&p=84047However much was spent on the latest purported Gonski outline for fixing Australia's schools, know that it was worse than wasted. Not only do the report's edu-babbling authors not recognise what is wrong, their prescription casts each and every existing ill as virtues

]]>After reading the results of David Gonski’s 2.0 review into how best to raise standards, one only hopes the Sydney-based businessman is more effective as chair of the ANZ bank than he is in his occasional role as Australia’s educational guru. The report, released this week, epitomizes all that is wrong with Australia’s education system and represents yet another example of the Turnbull government’s political ineptitude.

The report, Through Growth to Achievement, supposedly sets out the most effective way to spend the additional billions promised in an attempt to raise standards, as measured by our dismal performance in the international tests. If anything, such is the flawed, misconceived and simplistic nature of the report and its recommendations that, if implemented by the states and territories, it will have the opposite effect. It will condemn even more students to a dumbed-down and substandard educational experience.

One of the principal recommendations of the 2014 national curriculum review I co-chaired, based on a number of expert submissions, argued against including general capabilities like critical and creative thinking and personal and social capability in the curriculum. Such capabilities do not exist in isolation, as by their very nature they only arise when grounded in established disciplines or subjects. It is impossible to be creative if you don’t know anything. The ability to think critically must be taught in the context of particular subjects.

The ability to be creative with language requires a knowledge of grammar, punctuation, syntax as well as the language exemplified by our finest literature. Critical thinking, in addition to being taught in English, is also central to the type of logical processes needed when learning mathematical algorithms.

The Gonski 2.0 report, instead of acknowledging the central importance of giving students a rigorous and detailed grounding in essential knowledge, priorities “the acquisition of general capabilities”. The justification, in the vacuous jargon much loved by progressive educators, is because students are living in “a complex and challenging world”, one that is “ever-changing” and characterized by “significant economic, social and technological change”. Not only are such statements trite, they ignore the reality as argued by Michael Oakeshott that education involves a conversation that has been on-going for centuries. What is described as the core curriculum, involving mathematics, science, literature, art, music and history, can be traced back to through the Reformation and all the way to ancient Rome and Greece. As proven by tragedies such as Medea, The Bacchae and the Oedipus trilogy, human nature has changed very little over thousands of years. To be human is to face enduring questions about the nature of existence, what constitutes the good life and how best to find happiness and fulfilment.

One of the prevailing fads in education relates to “personalised learning” (formerly known as “child-centred leaning”) where the student is placed at centre stage and the purpose of education is to promote individual growth. Linked to this approach is the replacement of summative assessment, which sees some pass and some fail, with formative, diagnostic assessment on the basis that all must be winners. As such, the Gonski 2.0 report argues schools must get rid of year levels and the assumption that students should achieve set standards at key stages. Ranking students in terms of performance is also verboten, as the focus must be on “the individual progress a student makes over time along a defined learning progression”. Teachers are also told they must adopt “tailored teaching for growth” where each student leaves school “a creative, connected and engaged learner with a growth mindset”. In addition, they must “transition to diagnostic assessment and differentiated teaching within a framework of learning progressions”.

In addition to the Gonski 2.0 report being awash with edu-babble and ignoring the research about how best to raise standards it also shows an appalling ignorance of what has been happening in schools and what is possible in relation to its recommendations. For years now, schools have had to adopt personalised approaches to learning and assessment where each student has to be monitored, evaluated and assessed on a daily basis. Teachers are also told they must devise individualised learning plans for each student and that assessment must be “collaborative, negotiated and continuous”.

In addition to turning teachers into bean counters and drowning them in red tape and checklists, they are denied the time and opportunity to actually teach – to engage and motivate students and see them interact as a class. Gonski 2.0 represents more of the same.

Given the money and time invested in the review it is also scandalous that there is little, if any, recognition of what characterises stronger-performing education systems and schools.

One looks in vain for any recognition of the benefits of autonomy, diversity and choice represented by a more market driven model of education or the strengths of an academically rigorous curriculum and an assessment system with explicit standards ranking students at key stages.

Dr Kevin Donnelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University and author of Dumbing Down.